What Do You Think?

In many discussions you as the facilitator are trying to stay above the fray so participants can wrestle with a complex issue in which no clearly right answer exists. In such situations people will eventually confront you directly and ask what you think. Yet you may well be reluctant to answer for fear of inducing colleagues, students, and community members to parrot your view as the right one. This technique enables you to give your opinion while still asking people to engage with multiple viewpoints.

Purposes

• To show that you respect participant eagerness to know what you think
• To give your opinion in a way that doesn't unduly bias subsequent conversation
• To engage people in thinking through how they judge the reasoning behind another's comments

How It Works

• When a group insists that you give your opinion, you tell them you will provide two or three possible answers, one of which represents your actual opinion. You also say you are going to ask people to choose which answer they feel actually represents your true belief.
• You then give two or three plausible responses that represent different views on the issue. Standing at different stations in the room as you express each opinion helps.
• After hearing your responses participants vote on which of them represents your actual opinion. People then go and stand at the station representing their vote.
• At their stations you ask people to talk for two or three minutes about the reasons for their answer choice. Some choose a response because they've heard you express something similar before, some because it makes the most sense, or some because it seems to tally with expert opinion or a consensus in the field.
• The different groups then present the reasons why they chose the response they did.
• You reveal which of the responses represents your actual position and talk about the group reasons for choosing views you do not hold.

Where and When It Works Well

1. When teaching critical thinking. This can be instructive in assessing the assumptions and overall reasoning that underlie different viewpoints.
2. When trying to get people to make independent judgments. This exercise gives participants practice in not adopting opinions just because they are held by authority figures.

What Users Appreciate

1. Putting the facilitator on the spot. Participants often enjoy seeing the leader struggle to provide equally plausible yet opposing positions.
2. Not keeping the facilitator's views a secret. Many users appreciate it when leaders agree to answer their question, albeit in a convoluted and roundabout way!
3. Making criteria visible. It's helpful to explore the criteria all of us use to judge whether a discussant's comments honestly and plausibly reflect her or his views.

What to Watch Out For

1. Doing this with unimportant issues. This exercise should be used only when you need people to grapple with major issues and learn how to respond. When overdone with smaller issues, it becomes tiring and predictable.
2. Not having convincingly plausible alternative responses. When the question “what do you think?” is sprung on you out of the blue it's often difficult to come up with different plausible answers on the spot. If that's the case, avoid this exercise.
3. Clearly favoring one of your responses. No matter how much you strive to give each answer with similar conviction and animation, there are sometimes subtle indications (tone of voice, degree of eye contact) that reveal your preferences.

Questions Suited to This Technique

This is not really a question-generating technique but more a way of asking learners to assess the relative plausibility of different responses you have provided.