Academic classroom discussions
Comments(1) Chapter 5 on academic classroom discussions made me think about what I feel a productive classroom discussion should look like. To me this would be a discussion which is guided but not dominated by the teacher and I think asking appropriate questions is a key to this. I especially found the section on asking questions to be helpful as I have never really thought about the various types of questions in such detail before. But in thinking about my university experience, for example, we always had the best discussions in our classroom when the teacher provided some guiding questions that made us think about the major issues we should be focusing on, versus teachers who said “so who wants to say something?” and expected this to lead to an in-depth discussion. (I actually had one teacher who did this every week, and then got mad when no one really knew what to say). I can also see how the over-use of display questions leads to discussions that follow the IRF model, which tend to be dominated by the teacher, and I remember most of my own high school “discussions” to be modeled this way. These discussions were always surface-level and we were looking for the teacher’s approval that we gave the right answer, afraid to say something wrong and look stupid. I think that the best types of questions for fostering classroom discussion would be open-ended questions which allow students to analyze, interpret and take on other perspectives. They also don’t have “wrong” answers that can make students feel inadequate. I find open-ended questions helpful in my own learning for this reason. Also, it can be difficult to expand on display questions which are not really intended for deep thinking. In my discipline, social studies, open-ended questions are regularly used to get students to engage in critical thinking and interpretation which is a major aspect of the discipline and I know I will be using them as a teacher for my own class discussions and activities.
Very well said! I drew a lot of the same conclusions/points from the readings. I believe as a teacher the tendency is to adopt the I ask a question, you answer and I say yes or no model. I think we adopt this model almost naturally at times because we feel it is safe, we feel like we are engaging students and when they answer our questions to our satisfaction we feel like “yes! they finally get it”, when really its just one student in the room who happened to guess right in your trivia game you call “inquiry”. The truth of inquiry is removing the questions from the mouth of the teacher. I believe if you instil and promote inquiry in a classroom it should come to a point where students begin to ask questions themselves. This chapter did well to highlight a lot of ways in which we can question students in ways that promote thinking outside of a yes or no question. However I would argue that strictly open-ended questions are not the way to go. I think open-endedness can be a double edged sword. On one hand it promotes a student to expand their mind and question all that is in front of them and this is good in itself. However at times I think it can be misleading, if all your questions are open ended students will have a hard time formulating core principles and foundational knowledge and could establish deeply rooted misconceptions. We can’t expect students to invent the wheel each time we ask a question. As my science methods teacher has been showing us, it’s about guiding from behind, pointing out the key points and interesting observations but letting the student put the pieces together, we must direct them on a course that leads them toward the answer, without giving the answer outright. I think questioning will be a skill that we will all work on throughout our careers and something we should focus on with a fierce commitment