Wednesday, November 14, 2007

socratic questions website/december book

Mariatte emailed me the following link on Deep Learning, which includes plenty of information such as a taxonomy of Socratic questions and how to give feedback to students regarding their questions/critical thinking, among other topics. It's a great follow-up to our last book!

Speaking of books, last week I-Chant emailed the DL regarding December's book: "Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms" by Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill. If you're going to the next meeting (Thursday, December 6) and want a copy of the book, please email I-Chant if you haven't done so already!

Friday, November 9, 2007

november meeting summary & info for december meeting

Yesterday we met to discuss William W. Wilen's "Questions, Questioning Techniques, and Effective Teaching". We found this book to be highly informative and it was also a nice change of pace from our previous lecture-driven and teacher portrait-driven readings. We touched on several topics including wait time, building the skill of developing/formulating questions, and the different types of questions that we can ask of our students. A lot of our discussion focused on the distinctions between question categories, such as high-convergent vs. low-convergent as well as the corresponding divergent question types. It was enlightening to us to read about these distinctions because we hadn't really thought of them before -- this also led into a side discussion on Bloom's taxonomy and developing questions for Personal Response Systems (aka clickers) for large lecture courses.

The art of asking questions is something that we all need to develop, particularly in the realm of preparing questions ahead of time to probe students' understanding and to achieve the intended level of thinking for which we aim.

From the students' side, we discussed how to help students generate their own questions, but we wanted to have a more in-depth look at how to deal with/react to questions that students ask of us. We touched on the issues of praise and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation as being important things to consider when determining how to encourage and shape students' lines of questioning.

For our next meeting in December, we want to continue on with reading about asking questions and the many subleties involved, from both the students' and the instructors' sides. Right now the next book is TBA, but we're hoping to find another book that's accessible online. Angela also brought up a great suggestion -- we should all bring in questions (e.g. from discussion activities) that we've used in our own classes so that we can share them with one another and discuss these as well. That would be an excellent way of bringing in what we read and merging it with what we hope to practice in our own classes.

Our December meeting will be held on Thursday, December 6 from 8:00-9:30am at the Asian American Activities Center top floor couch room. Once we determine the next book, we'll let everyone know what it is and how to access it.