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Questions: One Aspect of Teaching Excellence
Some years ago in a seminar I was taking at Madison, I was required to do a class presentation. I had taught for
years before taking this course, so I did the presentation as I would normally teach a class, meaning that I liberally
sprinkled my session with questions that required answers from the students. It drove the professor crazy - he
became so uncomfortable when students did not immediately respond that he continually answered for them. At the
time, it occurred to me that he did not have much confidence in his students’ abilities to think, reason, and answer.
He should have relaxed - they could have done it if he had given them the chance.
Excellence in teaching can, and does, take many forms. What works well in one situation may be a dismal failure in
a different situation; similarly, what works for one person may not for another. That said, however, I think we all
recognize certain aspects of good teaching, such as a broad and deep knowledge of the discipline, enthusiasm for
what we do, the ability to motivate students, and so forth. Asking effective questions and encouraging questions
from students is one aspect of excellence in teaching that is easy and enhances student learning (assuming that the
professor doesn’t take the students off the hook as my professor did in the above example).
Since increasing student knowledge is a basic goal, it makes little difference how brilliant a lecture is if the students
pay no attention to it. Therefore, a primary effort in my teaching is to keep the students with me, to keep them
involved - in short, to hook their attention and keep it on the material at hand. I use many techniques to do that,
including rock and mineral samples (I teach geography and geology), slides, videos, laser disk images, lab exercises
that involve data manipulation, computer work, lab experiments, etc. But mostly, I keep them involved with
questions.
I don’t address a class in a tradition lecture presentation. I do lecture, but not for 50 minutes, or even 15. Rather, I
present a few minutes of information. Then I stop and ask for questions from the students. If I get them, I address
whatever was asked and use my answer as a bridge to the presentation of the next few minutes of information. If I
don’t get questions from the students, I ask the questions. The questions I ask may be designed simply to review
what I have just presented; more often they are designed to make the students take the information I have
presented and apply it in some way or they are designed to lead us into the next bit of information that I will
present.
For example, assume that I have presented five or ten minutes of information on the formation and movement of
tornadoes. After that I might ask students what implications tornado movement has for the interpretation of
watches and warnings. Most students will quickly realize that, since tornadoes usually move from west or southwest
to east or northeast, locations to the west of an existing tornado are not likely in danger. At that point, I have an
opportunity to recognize students for their accurate interpretation. I also have an opening to explain the exceptions
to the general pattern of movement and to discuss warnings and watches.
While the process I have described above is simple, it is also effective because it keeps the students’ attention -
they know that I will ask questions and that they need to attend to what I am saying in order to be able to answer. It
is also effective because their answers give me an opportunity to assess how they have interpreted information. If
most of the class is stumped about something I have asked, I know I need to figure out where their confusion lies
and then do something to erase that confusion. Since I assess their knowledge every few minutes, I can clear up
misconceptions when they occur, not days or weeks later when their misunderstandings result in poor exam grades.
There are several tricks to asking effective questions. One is to ask questions that require thought and application,
rather than yes/no answers. In the example above, I might draw a line on the board representing a tornado’s path
and then ask what area would most likely be damaged as the storm moved and why it would be that area. To
respond correctly, the students have to incorporate an understanding of the storm’s past movement and then
predict its future path.
A second trick in effective questioning is to ask questions that relate the information to the students’ own
experience (or lack thereof). The above question on the future storm track is one that almost every student in the
class could easily answer. Hence, they all feel confident that they understand the information (and they do!). After a
discussion of where the storm would go, I might put a line on a map to the southwest of Manitowoc, indicating that
the storm would likely hit our city. I would then ask the students what area would be in danger. Of course, they
should all realize that we would be. But several of the students in the class will refuse to accept that a tornado can
hit Manitowoc, because they have been told all their lives that Lake Michigan will protect us from a tornado. It
won’t, but they are so convinced that it will that I need to discuss the situation for several minutes. After those few
minutes of discussion, there are usually several students who are so surprised that they continue to ask questions to
be certain that they have understood.
Underlying this method of teaching are several basic assumptions. Perhaps the most important is that the students
can, indeed, carry the class. I am confident that they will pay attention and integrate the information being
presented, and that they will be interested enough to do so. Basically, this assumption means that I respect my
students, their intellect, and their ability to work hard to learn. I also respect that most of them truly want to be
here, to succeed, and to impress me and themselves with their understanding. I show that respect by interacting
with them as adults, as adults who together have a job to do (all of us to teach and learn from each other), and who
will work hard to accomplish that job.
Another assumption that underlies this method of teaching is that thinking and learning are hard work and take
time. Therefore, if no one answers my question for a while, that’s okay. I’m perfectly willing to wait, because if I
jump in and answer for them, as my professor did years ago, the message they take away is that I’ll do the work, so
they can just sit back and relax. In other words, not think very hard. Pretty soon, because they are not thinking very
hard, they’re not learning very much, either.
A third assumption is that I do not have to control every minute in class to make learning happen. I am confident
that the students have the wisdom to keep us on track and attend to the important aspects of the class. If I feel that
a question will detour us from the material that needs our attention, I merely explain to the class that the question
asked was a good one but one that I feel needs a lengthy response and one for which they will not be responsible so
I choose not to respond in class. However, I then invite anyone who wants to hear the explanation to stay after class
while I address it. (Sometimes they do; sometimes not.) I then refocus our attention to the next topic, probably by
asking another question.
A fourth assumption is that my class is a learning community in the sense that we can all learn from each other. On
the first day of class, I emphasize that I will ask lots of questions and want them to do the same. I also make it clear
that I hold all students accountable for the information presented in response to questions, whether that information
comes from me or from one of them. Therefore, I frequently remind them that questions and answers are
everyone’s responsibility. And then the quizzes and exams I give prove it.
Of course, the method of teaching that I have described above is nothing new. Socrates was doing it long ago, and
therefore we refer to it as the Socratic Method. That sounds too fancy for my tastes, however. I prefer to think of it
merely as asking good questions and encouraging my students to do the same so that I know that we are all tending
to our collective business of enhancing our learning.
Raising the Bar for Student Learning (Otherwise Entitled "The Education of a Teacher")
When I started teaching in the l970s, I taught as I had been taught. I lectured, constructed laboratory exercises, gave "pop"
quizzes, and administered exams (a "6-weeks," a "12-weeks," and a final). Students knew the rules, no one objected, and they
learned.
The course moved smoothly from topic to topic, while the students took copious notes (their heads were down, anyway, and
they seemed to be writing frantically). They filled out the lab exercises that I dutifully graded and returned; we then discussed the
correct answers, they learned even more, and then they did a splendid job on the next exam or quiz. It seemed like a great
system - it had worked for me, so it should work for them, too.
Although I loved my teaching and took a great deal of interest and pride in my students’ progress, I wasn’t very analytical about
what I was doing. I didn’t have time to be very analytical. I was frantically trying to get lectures and labs ready. Only after some
semesters did I become hazily aware that the system wasn’t actually working quite as well as I had thought it was. Students
weren’t doing such splendid jobs on the exams and quizzes, after all. In fact, they sometimes did miserable jobs. Of course,
there were always those who scored very highly on the exams, which buttressed my belief that the work was doable and that
the students who did poorly were merely not working very hard.
Still, even if they weren’t working as hard as I thought they should, they were my students, and I had to deal with them. Also, I
liked them. They didn’t impress me as slackers - they seemed like nice, normal folks who wanted to succeed, so I began trying
to find ways to help them do that. What I have found over years of trial and error is that some of the techniques and
philosophies that I used twenty years ago did, indeed, work well. Sometimes they worked well in one situation but not in
another. Other techniques simply didn’t work at all.
Lecture worked, sort of. Lectures are a great way of conveying information, and that’s part of the role of any teacher. But
lectures the way I had been exposed to them as a student in a hall with 300 other students didn’t seem to work well for my
students. My students glazed over, went to sleep, or frantically took notes but didn’t understand much of what they wrote
down. I started trying to adapt. First, in an effort to keep people with me, I began peppering the "lecture" with questions. Now I
talk for a bit, perhaps five or ten minutes, and then ask students questions. I make a concerted effort to learn students’ names at
the beginning of the semester so that I can call on them by name. Since students know that I know their names and will ask them
questions (in front of their classmates - horrors!), they are much more likely to pay closer attention than students did years ago.
Peer pressure is a great motivator.
Second, I started making more obvious what I expected the students to know. I developed lists of terms and review sheets. I
also tried to convey my expectations about the amount of time I expected students to spend studying. To encourage them to
devote that time, I scheduled open lab hours and extra study sessions, especially before exams. I encouraged the students to
work in groups outside of class, and I began using group work much more often in class. All these techniques helped, and I
continue to use them today.
When I started teaching, I wasn’t too comfortable having students ask me many questions. What if I didn’t know the answers?
Over the years I became comfortable saying, "I don’t know - does anyone else?" or "Let’s find out." I now make a big point
about wanting students to ask questions, and I let everyone in the class know that all questions and any answers to them are
part of the class - every one is responsible for the information provided by everyone else. I incorporate some of the questions
and answers on quizzes and exams so that students know that I am sincere and because the information exchange occasioned
by students’ questions is often very pertinent - and interesting besides.
I no longer give pop quizzes. I finally realized that in spite of the possibility that they might face a quiz, students didn’t study for
one. They are all busy people, and instead of studying for what might not happen, they will choose to study for what they know
they are facing in other classes. So now I schedule all quizzes and make certain that there are a lot of them during the semester.
Since these quizzes are a certainty, students study for them, and learning has, indeed, improved.
Some years ago at a UTIC conference entitled "Looking at Labs" I got an idea from Fran Garb, another session participant
who at the time was teaching anatomy and physiology at UW-Stout and who is now an Academic Planner for System
Administration. Instead of having students fill out lab reports that she then graded and returned, Fran had begun using oral
quizzes to assess lab proficiency.
As I use the technique, students work in groups of four or five. They conduct experiments and answer lab questions together,
figuring out and learning material by helping each other. They then drill each other until everyone has mastered the information.
Toward the end of the lab period, I administer an oral quiz to each group, with students from all groups listening. The student
answering the oral quiz questions, which are taken from the lab exercises, is chosen by lot, and everyone in the small group
receives the grade earned by the student answering the question.
The result of this procedure is that students work hard during lab to thoroughly learn the information and to be certain that all lab
partners do, as well, since no one wants to be embarrassed by not knowing the information, nor does anyone want his or her
grade to be jeopardized by someone else’s lack of knowledge. Students like the procedure because they do well – they are
intensely involved with the material for the entire lab period, so of course they do well – and their grades reflect their success.
In recent years, I have stopped the traditional topic-to-topic presentation followed by exams and instead I now focus the
semester in most of my courses on a semester-end exercise that will require integration of material from the entire semester. I
still cover, in one form or another, most of the topics I used to cover, and I still give mid-term exams. However, I cover the
material in a different way than I used to. Instead of presenting a discrete body of information over which I will then test the
students, I concentrate on skills that I want the students to develop. Throughout the semester I discuss these skills with the class.
I also outline the semester-end project or exam that will require the students to use the skills, along with the content knowledge
that they will be acquiring during the course.
The project or exam differs from class to class, of course. I teach geography and geology to freshmen and sophomores in the
UW Colleges, the two-year schools of the UW System. In Weather and Climate, an introductory five-credit lab science, the
final project is an exam on weather forecasting. Students are presented with several days’ worth of meteorological data,
including temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, etc., and maps showing the location
of associated fronts. The students must then forecast the weather for the following day for some city on the maps. To be able to
do so, students must understand the meteorological parameters, how those parameters interact with each other, the factors that
influence those parameters, how the parameters change over time and space, and how they will interact in the future. In other
words, the students must have a command of all the material presented during the entire course; furthermore, they must be able
to use their knowledge.
The majority of the student’s grade on the exercise is based not on the actual forecast they present, but on the reasoning that
must accompany their forecast for each parameter. In an exercise such as this, students are no longer being graded on how
many facts they can remember, but rather on their ability to synthesize and integrate the material from the entire semester and
their ability to use the information to produce a forecast. Certainly my students today are working at a much more sophisticated
level than I was requiring twenty years ago. I have raised the bar considerably, and the students are jumping over it. Students
twenty years ago could have, too - I just didn’t have the bar properly placed.
World Regional Geography, a three-credit social science, is a difficult course to teach because of the extensive volume of
information involved. Some years ago, it dawned on me that, try as I might to find ways to increase their retention of
information, the students simply could not retain as much information as I was asking them to. At that point, I began to
emphasize analysis skills, rather than information retention. I no longer teach the "whole world." Instead, I select several
representative regions and the semester is spent in an analysis of patterns in those regions. For example, we discuss
demographics, economics, social characteristics, political patterns and problems, and so forth. We also view many slides from
those regions and analyze what we can infer about the region from what we see in the slide.
In this course, the culminating project is an exam on a region that we have not studied and about which students have not been
given reading assignments. Students are expected to use statistics and slides of the region to interpret what it is like and to
explain why it is like that. For example, assume that I give the students a suite of statistics that shows, among other things, a high
infant mortality rate and a low literacy rate. I might then ask students to describe the economic structure of the country and
explain why it is like it is.
I expect that the students will recognize that a high infant mortality rate and a low literacy rate are characteristic of a lesser
developed county, perhaps a former colony that may have lost many of its resources to a mother country; that a large percent of
the labor force will be in the primary (raw material extraction) sector, especially in agriculture, and that that agriculture will be
mostly propelled by human or animal, not mechanical, power; that the secondary (manufacturing) sector of the economy will be
quite minimal, and that what does exist is likely financed by money from the more developed countries.
This short example shows what I am aiming for in the class - not a command of geographic "trivia" about each region in the
world, but an understanding of patterns and how and why those patterns are intertwined with each other. I think that students
leaving my World Regional class today have a better understanding of regional differences and similarities than my students of
twenty years ago, who, I am certain, long ago forgot all those important geographic "facts" that I taught them (if they ever
learned them in the first place).
I incorporate assessment techniques in my teaching as much as I can because I have found that doing so enables me to tailor my
teaching to my students’ needs. Many of the techniques I use are informal, such as asking questions to track students’
understanding. Other techniques are more formal. I sometimes give pre- and post-tests, especially for semester-long efforts like
the two described above. The students and I get a charge out of these, because the pre-tests are basically blank. Students have
no idea of what to make of weather statistics at the beginning of the course, so when the end of the semester arrives and they
can make accurate predictions, accompanied by logical explanations of the reasons for their predictions, they are delighted at
their increased knowledge. They remember the pre-test, laugh at themselves because they were so uninformed, and feel
ultimately superior as knowledgeable veterans!
I ask that my students become part of the assessment process, not just by my administering assessment techniques to them but
by having them evaluate the class during the semester. About one-third of the way through the course, I take a day and we
discuss what is going right, what is problematic, and what we could improve. I have done this mid-course evaluation in a variety
of ways from simple class discussions to using a third party, usually another faculty member, who then reports the students’
comments to me, taking care to preserve the students’ anonymity. No matter how I have done it, I have found the students
eager to be involved, thoughtful in their comments, and pleased at having their suggestions taken
seriously. My teaching and their learning have always benefited.
I do lots of things differently today than I did in the mid-1970s, but I certainly don’t feel that I have found the best way to teach.
Actually, I am convinced that there is no best way. There are ways that work well in certain situations but not in others, or with
certain students but not with others. So I stay on the lookout for new ideas and incorporate them into what I do. I attended
Faculty College last May and left fired-up with a plethora of ideas that I can’t wait to try. I know that many of them will work
for my students, and I suspect that some of them won’t. I’ll work with the students to assess which are which, and will keep the
ones that work. That’s what good teaching is about - finding ways to enhance the learning that is the reason for the teaching in
the first place. I keep raising the bar, and the students keep meeting and jumping over it. I love watching them do it! |
