5 Axioms to Promote Deeper Discussions

Axiom 1: Inquiry Is King 

All great discussions have one thing in common, whether they exist in a classroom, a barber shop, a boardroom, or on a marriage counselor’s couch: inquiry. All participants in a great discussion are trying to figure something out. 

Sometimes it starts like this: 

Barber: How you gonna tell me LeBron is the GOAT when MJ never lost a finals? 

Client: How’s he not the GOAT? All-time scoring champ, top 10 in all major categories, and rings for three different teams? He’s been the best for decades! 

Sometimes it starts like this: 

Designer: If we build this submersible the way you described in your email, materials will cost double the price. Is there a cheaper way that doesn’t compromise safety? 

Engineer: There might be . . . it depends on the kind of safety you are looking for. Your way gets us near OSHA’s standard, but I think you need something sturdier. 

It doesn’t matter if a conversation is playful or contentious, frivolous or consequential, its best version involves two or more people trying to make sense of something through questioning it. Sometimes the inquiry is as explicit as it is in these examples. Often it is not. When I ask one of my daughters, “How was your day at school?” I am not just asking what they got up to. I am trying to figure out how this one day has contributed to their process of growing up. Did they learn anything about friendship? Did they wrestle with a math problem until it finally made sense to them? Did they work up the nerve to advocate for their needs with that teacher? (My eldest: “It was good.” Sigh.)  

Crucially, the end goal is not just to share information or opinions. Both information and opinions are stepping stones on the way to big questions. How do we determine the relative greatness of a pro basketball player? What’s a reasonable tradeoff between passenger safety and a company’s bottom line? This is what makes a discussion rich, both in the adult world and in our classrooms. Any discussion that exists just for students to share information or opinions has a cap on its potential. Kids who want to share will share and maybe answer some follow-up questions, and then we are in for an awkward silence. For prolonged engagement, we’ve always got to be trying to figure something, or someone, out. Which brings us to the next axiom. 

Axiom 2: The Will to Strengthen Relationships Is the Only Thing 

The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi famously said, “Winning isn’t everything, but it’s the only thing.” The quote has become a popular slice of sports Americana, a concise way for many of us to celebrate our competitive natures. Lombardi was amplifying a phrase that had been common in coaching circles even then, and according to a reporter who covered him, the coach grew to “wish to hell [he] never said that” (NFL Films, 2021). This was because he’d meant to argue that the “will to win” was the “only thing” (Dure, 2015). Lombardi was trying to say that every time one of his teams took the field, they did so with winning in mind. They would never lower their standards or rest on the laurels of previous championships. 

We all hear a lot about how important it is for teachers to build relationships in our classrooms. They are everything. There is no way that you picked up this book still thinking that building relationships is not important, so I won’t bore you by stating the obvious. However, like Coach Lombardi, I want to make a clarification: Pre-existing classroom relationships are not as important as the genuine will to strengthen them. This isn’t just semantics. If we believe that relationships are everything, then it makes sense to build them proactively (i.e., before class discussions), hoping that doing so will inoculate us against catastrophe. This early work is a good practice that any thoughtful teacher would recommend. 

However, it’s easy for us to assume that once we have built these relationships to a certain degree—the students are speaking respectfully, they are showing care—we should move on from relationship building. If we do so, we might forget to plan discussions that direct students’ inquiry not just at our subject matter but at each other. And then, unfortunately, we might find the relationships in the room regressing as quickly as they had been built. To put it simply, the job isn’t over after early successes. We must help students who have already grown close to each other to leave our class discussions knowing each other even more authentically. If we commit to doing so, the next axiom should come naturally.  

Axiom 3: Joy Fuels Some of the Most Memorable Discussions 

I am pretty good at teaching the structure of analytical writing. Students tend to leave my 9th and 10th grade ELA classroom better at basic grammar and mechanics than they were in September. We read rigorous books that push students to use nearly every tool in their comprehension toolkits. And you know what? When I speak to parents, I have never been complimented on these efforts. It’s always, “He really liked that he got to write so many stories” or “I can’t believe that she liked that book! I hated it in high school.” Or my runaway favorite, “Every night, she wants to tell us what you all were talking about in class. I feel like I’m auditing it.” 

I was always honored by this, but I didn’t get it until I was a parent. When my daughter went to school for the first time, all of a sudden, I found myself feeling genuinely touched when she would come home excited to tell us a story about something cool she’d discussed in class. Both my wife and I are career educators who intimately know the importance of a strong foundation, and yet, the most important thing to us is that she likes learning. We want her formal schooling to encourage—and not stamp out—her natural curiosity. At the most basic level, she has to be at school. For seven hours. It should not feel like confinement. Whether it was Ms. Alexis and Mr. Will in preschool; Lisa and Mary Beth in preK; Katie, Rachel, and Sarah in kindergarten; or Bernadette and Brian in both 1st and 2nd grades, we appreciated the moments that they made our young child—who was just beginning her school journey—laugh, smile, and dream. We love them because they prioritized joy.  

We don’t talk about fun enough in secondary education, and it’s a shame. For example, the “I can’t believe she likes that book” remark from some parents makes me so sad. It also always seems to be the classics, which I teach sparingly, that spark this kind of comment. But those old books can be so spicy! The Odyssey? Battles, intrigue, and sex! Lord of the Flies? A bunch of kids lose their natural minds! We shout “Whoa!” and gasp when Bigger Thomas kills Mary Dalton in Native Son. Discussions are a way to show students that something is funny, scary, or exciting when otherwise they might not see it. Frankly, these revelations keep teachers necessary in this AI era of schooling. In our discussions, kids share a laugh or a gasp that makes them feel like fellow human travelers to a cool, fun place. If joy is there to be had, we’ve got to grab it as systemically as we can, which is helped by the next axiom.  

Axiom 4: Routines Matter 

Nationally, around 12.5 percent of a fitness club’s new members sign up during the first weeks of the calendar year (Bats, 2022; Connor, 2019; de Bruin 2021). However, a large percentage of these new folks cancel their memberships soon after, 50 percent before the end of January, and as high as 80 percent within the first five months (Bats, 2022; Connor, 2019; de Bruin, 2021). Any gym that does not find ways to manage this problem will fail. Knowing this, clubs have spent a lot of energy figuring out how to hold onto as many “New Year, New Me” members as possible. It begins with acknowledging that people who join during the January rush are often just setting off on their personal fitness journeys. They walk into a gym not knowing how to use equipment or perform certain exercises. Some start trying exercises at random, copying what they’ve seen and hoping for the best.

After a month or so of this approach, they grow discouraged and fall off. Knowing this, fitness clubs constantly try to flatten the learning curve by showing new folks specific routines. The Planet Fitness chain commits wholly to this, dedicating a large section of each of their gyms to a scripted 30-minute workout. This area has 20 numbered stations, and each has a placard with specific exercise instructions. This, along with all manner of support through phone apps, is meant to give people the comfort and confidence of a routine as early as possible. Then, hopefully, they will stay around. 

In many ways, this is the story of teachers’ relationship with class discussions. We are inspired to make our pedagogy more dialogic, but we are unsure how to do so. So, we test cool-sounding discussion strategies that we’ve seen on TV or heard about at a conference. We try these strategies more or less randomly. After a month or so of this approach, we (or our students) sometimes get frustrated at uneven results. 

Our class discussions must settle into a routine. Ideally, this routine should include a few whole-class activities (like interactive read-alouds), a few small-group activities (like fishbowls and Socratic seminars), and a few one-on-one activities (like peer reviews or interviews). None of these discussion activities are inherently better than others, but some are better for certain students, in certain moments. We get to be the professionals who decide which activities make our Planet Fitness-esque circuit. But once we do, we’ve got to commit to the workout, at least for a while. Our students deserve the chance to get good at a discussion activity through repetition and reflection. And so do we! This is especially important with activities that provide chances for joy. I think back on specific discussion activities, such as interviewing characters from books, that my students loved but that I only did once a year when that specific chapter in that specific book rolled around. It seems such a waste to not make that joyful activity something kids can look forward to trying again soon.  

Axiom 5: And Yet, Surprises Also Matter! 

Many of us have a few signature classroom catchphrases. My students often imitate my ominous announcement of a quiz (“Let’s go. Blank sheet of paper, name, date, stream!”) or my jaunty reminder to keep their writing minds open (“Don’t marry that idea, date it for a while!”). Later in the year, I’m known to playfully tease students, reminding them that, “I am so boring. I am so predictable.” If it’s Monday, we are starting the class by sharing our good news. If it’s Friday, the class will start with silent sustained reading. All recorded small-group discussions must be seven minutes or longer. If we are discussing a reading as a whole class, we will read it aloud, just like we did yesterday and the day before. (And yes, if I assigned that reading, I’m quizzing that reading. I love seeing students chuckle at my, “Ain’t no ‘pop’ quizzes in this class! You knew about this, so save all that sighing for someone else.”) 

And yet, within these routines, it helps to find space for surprises. Especially with class discussions. It’s one thing to commit to regular interactive read-alouds. It’s another to have all of these interactive read-alouds feature the teacher performing as the star protagonist. It’s one thing to host small-group discussions twice a week. It’s another to make them always about the core texts and never about supplementary sources or the real world. It’s one thing to rely on daily turn-and-talks. It’s another to have all turn-and-talks end with sharing with the whole class.  

Furthermore, our routines don’t remove the need for the occasional splash discussion activity. We might not typically gamify our debates by adding points, but maybe keeping score might make a specific exchange more fun. Maybe a whole-class discussion could benefit from inverting the power dynamic, with the teacher sitting among the students while a kid offers the prompts. Guest appearances in discussions are often fun; sometimes an expert or an author stops by, and sometimes it’s just a colleague from another discipline. Maybe the discussion venue shifts outside because the weather is just so darn lovely. These moments aren’t the everyday meat and potatoes. They are the dessert: not offered after every meal but on the menu regardless just in case the sweet tooth calls.  

Source: From Prompting Deeper Discussions: A Teacher’s Guide to Crafting Great Questions (pp. 16–22), by M. R. Kay, 2025, ASCD. Copyright 2025 by Matthew R. Kay. Reprinted with permission.