The Costs and Benefits of a Leaderless Discussion

What I witnessed on Monday took me by surprise. I didn't know whether to be excited at tthe fact that the students would be in charge of their own discussion or dread the idea of having to endure 20 minutes of random ideas being tossed into the air. But in the end I have to say that the benefits of having a discussion in which the students are responsible for guiding the discussion. As I saw on Monday, we are ultimately forced to become more engaged in a discussion with our peers and thus we will inevitable gain more information. And though there is no established leader, there always seem to be an unspoken leader who automaticly takes control of the conversation. The one caveat to such a type of discussion is that there may be multiple individuals who seek to inherently take control of the conversation. Luckily that problem didn't not occur on Monday but it is possible. Overall, a leaderless discussion is good at certain times and must always be overseen by a teacher in order to ensure that the discussion does stray to far from the topic at hand. I would like to do this again.