Praise for Prompting Deeper Discussions
“Matthew Kay reminds us that vibrant student talk is the heartbeat of any engaging classroom, and Prompting Deeper Discussions provides teachers with in-depth practical steps for starting —and extending—deeper student conversations. As James Britton famously said, ‘Reading and writing float on a sea of talk,’ and this book is a valuable resource for centering this important talk in your classroom.”
Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide: How Our Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It
“In Prompting Deeper Discussions, teacher Matt Kay pulls back the curtain on crafting questions that lead to fabulous classroom conversations. Through his clear analysis, illuminating classroom examples, and lively writing, Kay shares his classroomtested approaches with fellow educators, equipping us to adapt his simple, powerful planning and implementation techniques for our specific teaching contexts. Prompting and facilitating deep, engaging, productive discussions isn’t magic, and it’s no longer mystery, thanks to Kay’s superb, tight, useful book. Highly recommended!”
Tracy Johnston Zager, author of Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had: Ideas and Strategies from Vibrant Classrooms
“Clearly and concisely, Matthew Kay delivers the essential pedagogical moves necessary to lead and deepen classroom discussion. Prompting Deeper Discussions will help new and experienced teachers alike how to think more intentionally about how they structure their discussions and anticipate and handle the dilemmas and issues teachers often face in this important aspect of instruction. Drawing from his many years in the classroom, Kay has gifted us with a book for educators to meaningfully improve professional practice across the content areas.”
Bruce Lesh, author of Why Won’t You Just Tell Me the Answer? and Developing Historical Thinkers
“A meaningful classroom discussion is perhaps the most authentic thing we can do as educators, but it also can be one of the most difficult things to structure well. What Matt has done with this book is create the conditions by which teachers can improve their facility at the classroom discussion, and make classrooms more meaningful and powerful for all their students. Prompting Deeper Discussions is a practitioner’s book—it is written by a master teacher for teachers everywhere.”
Chris
Lehmann, founding principal, Science Leadership Academy
“Matthew Kay has managed another brilliant work for educators with Prompting Deeper Discussions. As he has done so well before, Matt opens the door to his classroom and welcomes you in to observe his planning and lessons. This book is absolutely on target for the moment we are in, and Matt connects all the dots to help readers understand the importance of class discussions and how they are facilitated. He makes the process of planning for these conversations look obvious and easy, and he gives us the tools to actually make it so!”
Jennifer Orr, elementary educator and author of Demystifying Discussion
First published in 2024 by ASCD.
Copyright © 2026 Matthew R. Kay. All rights reserved.
ASCD® is a registered trademark of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Published in Australia under license by Ingrove Press.
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Phone: (03) 8686 9077
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Code: ASC2347
ISBN: 9781923412347
Printed in Australia.
Ingrove Press (formerly Grift Education), a division of Ingrove Group. For permission to reproduce material from this publication, please contact orders@ingrovegroup.com.
In Loving Memory of Sherrill Jones Kay, my mother, a 36-year teaching veteran, and the reason I do what I do.
Introduction: We Got to the Future Fast, Didn’t We?
During my student teaching, my hands got chalky as I scribbled grammar rules on an old-school blackboard. At my first teaching job in 2005, I still faithfully used a physical grade book, like teachers had done for generations before me. Over time, a more robust internet, together with smartphones and more ubiquitous social media, showed up to radically change a lot of what teaching looked like. But with each shift, educators found a new equilibrium, as we always seem to do. Now, in a dizzying flash, we have all arrived at another radical change—one that we knew would one day exist, but only in some far-off Star Trek future: the dazzling era of generative AI. Suddenly, our students can access digital clerks that can craft everything for them, from essays and stories to music, artwork, and “original” films. And even more advanced versions of these AI tools will be around to help these students when they are adults, “writing” not only their grant proposals and expense reports, but also the wedding vows that make future partners weep.
I cannot name all the ways that these rapid technological advancements might influence our classroom instruction. I can say, with a certainty that is rare to come by nowadays, that if we teachers don’t know how to lead a high-quality class discussion about a book, time period, or a scientific or mathematical theory, this deficit will hurt more than it ever has. Because from now until forever, our students will know that every book, time period, or theory can be broken down and analyzed for them, then processed into any artifact they want. So—wildly—if students don’t want to go through the productive struggle of creating
something for our classes, they rarely have to. An “easy button” is always available. Very soon, some of the only authentic evidence of what students know will be the words that, in real time, come out of their mouths.
This realization can be overwhelming. Our class discussions are complex, unpredictable, and fragile. Any one thing might turn a success into a failure. Sometimes our pacing is off—we linger too long with a back-and-forth that should have been quick, or we rush students on from a fruitful exchange that deserves much more time. Every once in a while, the energy in the room is just off, our students are not as into it as we thought they should have been, or they are distracted by outside noise that we can’t control. As we try to keep our most important class discussions from stalling, we are often told to look inward, examining our privileges and biases, our cultural competency. This is useful work that is important not just for many aspects of our pedagogy but also for our relationships with students.
Yet many of us have found that although such reflection has made us better people, it has not solved the core issue: Would-be extraordinary class discussions continue to draw blank stares. Students don’t seem invested in debates that they should be fired up about. The class gets to that awesome part of that awesome book, only to respond with a collective shrug. We have done the work, finding culturally representative sources and centering our students’ lived experiences, and well, meh. Kids might participate, but it feels dry and rote, the kind of robotic hand raising that seems more like checking off the participation-grade box (or offering favors to an increasingly desperate teacher). How can we bring more oomph to our class discussions? Infuse them with fire? Or at the very least, keep them from repeatedly falling flat?
Discussion Prompting, Put to the Test
This concern never loomed larger than it did in the spring of 2020 and, for some of us, the entirety of the next school year. March hit, and suddenly, we had to teach from our dining room tables and home offices, as our children played or went to school themselves in the next room. A beautifully decorated classroom was now a Zoom or Google Meet
Introduction: We Got to the Future Fast, Didn’t We?
window. A well-planned seating arrangement was now a participants list. Most important, many of our students’ faces were now wordless black boxes. I used to, only half-jokingly, refer to this stilted virtual experience as “teaching, without most of the fun parts.”
This was a spartan moment in our careers. If we were brave enough to lead class discussions, we had only our deliberately positive faces, our strained voices, and the words that we typed into the chat. And these words—these prompts—had to be good. We could not supplement them with any front-of-the-classroom dramatics. We could not walk around the room and nudge kids who had their heads down. We could not read students’ faces to see if our words had landed or if they were confused. Our typed words had to hook and challenge students. They had to be intriguing enough to maintain students’ interests as a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime mix of pandemic and social unrest screamed for their attention. Our words had to compete with video games that could be played in class and TV shows that could be watched in class, both sometimes sharing the same screen as our lesson. This humbling pandemic experience pushed educators toward many realizations, most of which are still relevant as we teach in the post-pandemic world. None were more practical than this: Great discussions are sparked by great prompts, asked by an agile teacher, at the best time, to a group of students that has been rightly prepared to discuss them.
About This Book
Part I of this book will describe how to craft and refine these vital discussion prompts. Its first chapter will help teachers set goals for class discussions that are both ambitious and realistic. Its second will describe how to thoughtfully prepare to lead these powerful class discussions. Its third chapter will answer some of the most common questions about discussion prompts, then show, in detail, how to craft them. Finally, its fourth chapter will show how we teachers can keep our well-prompted discussions from falling flat.
Part II will be interactive. Readers will be provided excerpts from classroom texts and then be invited to plan discussion prompts around them. After giving readers space to do so, this book will share prompts
that I (and some of my colleagues from other disciplines who were generous enough to be interviewed) have created for the same excerpts. I hope that these examples can spark interesting conversations between colleagues, or even like-minded teacher friends, who, like me, are just trying to get a little better at prompting deeper discussions.
