Facilitate Peer Interactions
Regardless of the format used to teach with socioscientific issues, in all cases the instructor becomes a facilitator, presenting and guiding the students through the issue rather than providing all of the information. A typical scenario places students into small break-out groups after a topic is introduced and initially discussed. It is equally effective to have students delve into an issue by themselves in a lecture session prior to sharing their thoughts with a larger group in a lecture or recitation section. The group size will be highly dependent on the number of both students and available facilitators in the classroom. Pelesko and Marsteller's "flexible facilitation models" (2008) is an excellent guide to constructing groups according to the exact needs of the classroom