This paper by Leupen et al (2020) was of great interest to me because this is something that I struggle with in my own teaching: how to promote educationally-rich discussion among students? In this study, the authors recorded the conversation of a few teams a couple of times during the semester when student teams were discussing the solution to an in-class instructor assigned problem. The results are not much of a surprise to me. Students had deeper conceptual conversations when the questions assigned asked students to consider course material at a higher level of Bloom's taxonomy.
If the results are unsurprising to me, why do I find the study interesting? I find it interesting because it validates my own suspicions that to promote students' critical thinking requires asking students to take course material and apply it to significant situations.
The physiology course under investigation in this paper used the instructional strategy of team-based learning (TBL), a flipped-classroom approach to teaching and learning that I use in my own courses. What the authors identify, and I agree with them from my own experience, is that one of the reasons that students may have engaged at a deeper level with higher-order cognitive questions in their study may be because 1. student teams were stable throughout the term and thus students may feel more comfortable with each other in querying each other about their thinking; 2. the pre-class preparation inherent in TBL makes lower-order cognitive questions trivial because the students already know the rote-learning for which they were held accountable before the in-class applications of their learning; 3. that any student may be called upon during the inter-team discussion to explain the rationale for their answer.
I have difficulties doing this well. The difficulty for me is finding the right balance between posing a significant non-trivial problem to students that is difficult for them to solve on their own but is possible to solve as a team. This is Vygotsky's zone of proximal developing in which the potential for learning is rich. But finding that Goldilocks point for any given cohort of students or any given course year-level is difficult. Sometimes I get it right, but many times I make it too easy (trivial) or too difficult.
Regardless of the difficulty of teaching, it is good to hear in this article that the effort seems to be worth it.
Resouces
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman (Eds.), Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (pp. 79–91). Harvard University Press.
