A while ago I met up for a coffee with a former student of mine. We discussed how med school was going but also ended up discussing how they learn and how they viewed my teaching while a student at Augustana. Granted this may not be a candid assessment but it is interesting how they said that it was my way of asking the class questions during my lectures that made the material become significant for them and made it stick in their understanding. They were so pleased that in the previous term they were able to map out the explanation for the acetone scent on the breath of diabetics. It just flowed out of their head and mouth while they explained the concept and how it was relevant to their team problem on metabolic acidosis.
So, a nice example of what I am trying to achieve in my teaching: deep learning.
This made me think about my own efforts to master team-based learning (TBL) and make my classroom more actively engaged. According to my former student, my classes are already engaging with my questions, but I know that this is not the perception of all of my students. So, I wonder if what I really need to do is not lose what I already do well - asking questions that highlight the relevance of what I am teaching - but mix it up with other active learning strategies.
Students have been indicating this on the end of term student ratings of instruction for those courses in which I implemented TBL. Many students suggest that either a little less or a little more TBL (depending upon the course and degree I implemented TBL) mixed in with the questioning style of lecturing I have used in the past might be good.
So maybe I simply need to identify in my courses those topics that would best benefit students as a TBL module would be a better way to go rather than being a slave to the TBL teaching strategy? One of my English colleagues does this in her literature courses; she ensures that the TBL process is peppered with mini-lectures. I have been trying to ensure this happens to a greater extent instead of relying on student feedback to inform me what they need help with. But many students are reluctant to provide this sort of feedback. This results in me needing to be a mind reader of my students' strengths and weaknesses and intervene when I identify weaknesses.
Difficult, but necessary. As novices, students have difficulty identifying what they do and do not understand. I need to find strategies that help us identify those areas for both myself and my students. Better designed quizzes would help - but also going back through the decades of experience I have will also help identify those areas.
Maryellen Weimer has a nice article that discusses an article by Allen and Tanner about asking questions. The Allen and Tanner article focuses on using Bloom's taxonomy of learning to assess the quality of our questions and notes. Similar to Eric Mazur, Allen and Tanner suggest that students will study for the types of questions being asked on assessments. We may wish to have students engaged in analysis and evaluation - application of the material being taught. But if we only ask factual recall questions, then students will realize that is all they need to study for and the opportunity for deeper learning will be lost. Mazur advocates that our assessments must be authentic and that if they are, that will drive how we teach and how our students learn.
So, if an excellent student such as the one I had coffee with tells me that my questioning during class compelled them to consider the deeper significance of what they were learning while learning it and that this led to long-lasting understanding, then I must be doing something right with my questioning approach during class. I think I could do better if I were more conscious about the kinds of questions I ask.
Resources
Weimer M. 2013. The Art of Asking Questions. The Teaching Professor 27(3): 5.
