Mark at wordandspirit started a discussion on the nature of small groups, as to whether they are more appropriate for teaching or discussion.

My personal view is that the discussions are very important - often without that people can’t manage to get their own grip on the concepts. At our homegroup we generally read the passage in either one whole chunk or smaller chunks that we can look at one at a time with the reading and then working through the passage and the ideas that come from it.

Generally I think the biggest problem for small groups is when the person who is leading the discussion isn’t adequately prepared or thinks that they don’t need to bother with preparation or background reading before hand. I know it’s easy to do - I’ve done it myself , but it makes a huge impact on the quality of discussion if you’ve done your work!