You ask an opening question and nobody answers. The pause runs long enough that answering becomes a bigger act than it was five seconds ago. Then the same three students rescue you, as they did last week, and the hour runs on their reading of the text.
Two rooms look identical from the front. In one, most people did not get to the reading and have nothing to say. In the other, they read it closely and will not risk a half-formed thought in front of eleven people they will sit with again next Tuesday. The responses are opposites — read a passage together, or make the first contribution smaller — and picking wrong wastes the session. Asked out loud, nobody will tell you which room you are in, because both answers are embarrassing in front of the group. Asked without a name attached, almost everyone will. The same move lets every student take a position before the confident ones have set the tone.
The first two are diagnosis, and take about four minutes between them. The third is the spine of the session: everyone commits privately, then the spread goes on the wall and the room argues about it. The wording and the options are yours. The order is the part worth keeping.
First, because everything after it depends on the answer. Anonymously, students will tick 'the first few pages'; asked around a table they will not, and you will spend forty minutes discussing a text half the room has not read.
Replace this with one detail from the middle of your own text — something a skim would miss. 'I read it' and a right answer are different claims, and the gap between the two counts is more useful than either on its own.
The whole point of the session. Everyone commits before anyone speaks, so no position in the room is a reaction to the loudest one, and the spread on screen is the agenda you were going to have to invent.
Now you have arguments rather than a bar chart. Read out one from each end: the disagreement is between two sentences, not between two students who have to share a room for the rest of term.
Ask it once the discussion is moving and starting to lean on the vocabulary. Nobody admits this in a small group, and it is often the exact reason a student who did the reading has said nothing.
You have time for one thread, not four. Making the group choose puts the students who have not spoken into the decision, and it costs them nothing to make.
If half the group stopped after a few pages, spend ten minutes reading one passage together and discuss that instead — you will get a better seminar than the one you planned. If they read it and still will not start, the problem is not preparation and no amount of waiting will fix it.
In a group this size the tutor's reading is the strongest anchor in the room, and a question framed with it comes back to you almost unchanged. Ask the proposition flat, collect it, and give your own view after the spread is on the wall.
A student who will not defend an opinion as theirs will happily explain what the four people at the left-hand end might be thinking. Something on the wall to point at turns a personal risk into a shared object, and it is the cheapest way into the discussion for whoever needed one.
If nearly everyone lands at four or five you have asked them to summarise the reading rather than judge it. Choose the claim the text genuinely leaves open, and if the room agrees anyway, sharpen it on the spot and ask again — it takes thirty seconds.
'The strongest objection here says the sample was chosen to fit' keeps the argument alive without making anyone defend it. In a group that meets every week, attributing a position is what makes people stop taking them.
These are an opening move. If the discussion is running, do not interrupt it to collect another set of answers — a seminar that has become a survey has lost the thing you were trying to protect.
Every question above, ready to edit into your own text and your own week. Put the code on screen, and the group answers from the phones already in front of them. No account for the students, and nothing for them to install.
Poll a hall of three hundred and find out who is lost before you move on
Hear from all thirty, not the four with their hands up
Find out what the class understood while there is still time to act
Give remote students the same way in as the people in the room