I've begun my year with my traditional online forum discussion using the forum tool embedded in our Intranet software package Moodle. The course I teach is NCEA Level 2 Economics, a course that requires deep thinking, and a lot of analytical writing. The literacy expectations of the course are well expressed by the fact that the three external standards all provide UE literacy (Writing) credits, while the internal standard we offer provides UE literacy (Reading) credits.
The topic I choose is a discussion of the issue of the free market. It almost invariable ends up as a discussion of the libertarian paradox as we embrace issues such as power imbalances and inequality associated with markets.
My approach is always the same, The boys post in response to my fundamental question about the benefits or otherwise of the free market. As they post, I respond individually to every post written by every boy. However my response is NEVER to give answers, ALWAYS to pose further questions. My response to every boy is unique, asking questions that are specific to that boy's post, steering and guiding in a way appropriate to that boy's current knowledge (as revealed by his post) and the specific angle that the boy appears to be taking in the discussion. I think that this is a fantastic way to differentiate learning.
This year's result is strikingly more sophisticated than in previous years. I have been more careful about my responses, trying to make sure that I even more appropriately tailor each response to each boy. Regardless of the medium (online, on paper, face to face) this has always been true.
The result has been a significant amount of learning, created by constant (socratic?) questioning. At no stage have I given any of the bis specific knowledge/content, yet the learning has been apparent and significant. I asked the boys if they had learned much, and they universally agreed that they had.
Course to discourse? I'm not sure that I necessarily understand what that means, but I hope so.
Showing posts with label socratic questioning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socratic questioning. Show all posts
Friday, February 13, 2015
Friday, August 8, 2014
Twitter, student engagement, and feedback
It started out as a lesson on interest rates and exchange rates. It ended up as a lesson on interest rates and exchange rates, but the path through the lesson wasn't what I'd planned.
I posed two questions to the class, one a closed question, and the other a question demanding an explanation. It was a spur of the moment decision, as you do sometimes in teaching when your instinct says that you should try something, and I asked the boys to open up their Twitter app (either the Twitter web page, or Tweetdeck, as it turns out). They answered the closed question with a tweet, a warm up for Twitter as much as anything else, and then they had to Tweet the explanation of what they had just tweeted. The tweets were streamed live onto the whiteboard at the front of thew class (yes I still have a whiteboard at the front of the class, and yes the boys still sit at desks, in chairs - I'm so old fashioned..).
Here are a couple of tweets. I haven't shown the whole image as I wanted to make sure that I anonymised the tweets, so I had to screen shot to avoid each boy's name.
As the individual tweets appeared on the screen I gave each boy feedback on his response. The feedback was in the form of additional questions that might prompt them to edit and improve their tweets, which many did (just a touch of the old socratic questioning here, based largely on pushing boys through the SOLO thinking framework).We then repeated the exercise with an additional question.
Normally I'd have run a class discussion. Despite my practised skills in running class discussion, I would not have managed to get an individual explanation/answer from every boy. I asked them to put their hands up if they would have worked to stay under my radar in a class discussion - over half the hands went up.
What happened here? I managed to engage every boy in the class. What's more, I'd managed to give every boy individual feedback on his answer.
Hattie says:
The feedback I'd given related to exactly where each boy's tweet suggested he was in his understanding of the issue at hand.
This felt like a 'pretty good day at the office'.
I posed two questions to the class, one a closed question, and the other a question demanding an explanation. It was a spur of the moment decision, as you do sometimes in teaching when your instinct says that you should try something, and I asked the boys to open up their Twitter app (either the Twitter web page, or Tweetdeck, as it turns out). They answered the closed question with a tweet, a warm up for Twitter as much as anything else, and then they had to Tweet the explanation of what they had just tweeted. The tweets were streamed live onto the whiteboard at the front of thew class (yes I still have a whiteboard at the front of the class, and yes the boys still sit at desks, in chairs - I'm so old fashioned..).
Here are a couple of tweets. I haven't shown the whole image as I wanted to make sure that I anonymised the tweets, so I had to screen shot to avoid each boy's name.
As the individual tweets appeared on the screen I gave each boy feedback on his response. The feedback was in the form of additional questions that might prompt them to edit and improve their tweets, which many did (just a touch of the old socratic questioning here, based largely on pushing boys through the SOLO thinking framework).We then repeated the exercise with an additional question.
Normally I'd have run a class discussion. Despite my practised skills in running class discussion, I would not have managed to get an individual explanation/answer from every boy. I asked them to put their hands up if they would have worked to stay under my radar in a class discussion - over half the hands went up.
What happened here? I managed to engage every boy in the class. What's more, I'd managed to give every boy individual feedback on his answer.
Hattie says:
"The aim is to provide feedback that is 'just in time', just for me', just for where I am in my learning process"(Hattie, J 'Visible learning for teachers, maximising impact on learning', Page 122)
The feedback I'd given related to exactly where each boy's tweet suggested he was in his understanding of the issue at hand.
This felt like a 'pretty good day at the office'.
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