Our names are Maosuf Togmah and Dylen Marcelle, the leaders of the CLS Reading Group at Boston College. Being that we are only sophomores in college, this is the first time that we’ve ever been given the responsibility for such a big project. Little did we know we were up for a rude awakening, even though we participated in the summer leadership workshop that was designed to prepare us and we felt fairly confident that we could manage the reading group with ease and weren’t stressed.
It took a lot of time and learning to adjust to the schedules, preferences, and personalities of all our friends in the group. For example, when we actually managed to get a meeting with everyone in attendance, a lot of our friends didn’t even read the assigned parts of the book that we were going to talk about. Some were genuinely busy with classes and their studies, while others just told us upfront they were too lazy to read. After we saw how people were likely to participate, we decided that we should just focus on a single book and shorten the reading even further than we originally intended. As a group, we came to a consensus that The Other West Moore by Wes Moore would be the book that we focused on.
Sadly, even after we came to this decision, this wasn’t our only struggle. We found it challenging to focus our discussions on one question at a time, as they would always get out of hand. Also, getting people to not talk over each other and to maintain peaceful discussions was a dilemma for us. At first when these things happened, we didn’t intervene because we thought the issues would resolve themselves. But we had to step in after a while, which wasn’t something we were comfortable doing because it made us feel like we were trying to act like teachers, or like we were above our friends. But it was necessary, because otherwise we would never successfully progress through discussion. Sometimes we would get stuck on a single question for the whole discussion and run out of time. Or we would let people in the club wander off topic, hoping they would come back on topic, and they wouldn’t. So the conversation would end on a completely different topic and would get stuck there, instead of being about what we had originally intended.
After some time observing people’s personalities and thinking about how best to engage them in our discussions, we managed to create a successful system for leading discussion and put a routine in place in which everyone was able to share their thoughts without interrupting each other or wasting time. We started to note the discussion styles amongst our friends in the group: who was the most talkative, who simply just liked to argue, who was more reserved, or who never read so they would just wing it and talk about whatever they felt like. We then used these observations to create an order for who would answer the questions first to last. The order was flexible, though in case some of our friends surprised us and didn’t participate in the manner they usually would. The first and second questions we would ask were more towards the comprehensive side, making sure our group understood the day’s reading. We had the more talkative amongst our friends answer the question first because it helped those who hadn’t fully completed the reading to know what was going on in the text. This kept them from going off topic later on in the discussion because they wouldn’t feel that they’d need to make up something to say on the spot. The third and fourth questions we posed were more interpretive. We asked the more reserved people to answer these questions so that they would be the ones that started debates. Being students ourselves we know if you don’t speak up a lot in class, it’s probably because you’re afraid your point isn’t good compared to others. But, we bet that if the quieter participants were the first to speak, they wouldn’t be able to second guess themselves. Right after that we invited people who like to debate to offer rebuttals to our reserved friends since they would always have a point to make. After that, the conversation was less fixed and was open to whoever wanted to talk again. When our system worked the first time we tried it, we felt proud.
Developing this system taught us the importance of observing others closely and being more purposeful in the way we structured things as discussion leaders. There is always a way to tackle problems; even if things don’t go as you initially planned, it’s not a sign that you failed. You just need to try it, so that you can find out what actually works. We both feel as though we have taken a lot from this experience and grew as leaders. We’re not guaranteed we’ll be 100% successful the next time we step up to lead, but we’re definitely better than before.