Questioning Strategies

13 June 06

I used a mix of Concept Tests and Cold Calling in class today. I wrote a problem on the board, asked the students to work it out individually, then I cold called on a student to come up to the board (or dictate from their seat) and explain their method. It worked pretty well, in fact the concept tests worked much better than I anticipated. Many of the students actually did share their results, but with their friends across the room, rather than the partner I envisioned sitting next to them.

I needed a better protocol (really, any protocol) for picking partners for the concept test, but the cold calling was good for that context.

I'm going to try a similar method tomorrow, and will report about those results then.

14 June 06

Ok, so I forgot the index cards with which I was going to cold call. Instead I improvised a method where I spun the class list to choose someone at random. It didn't really work that well and it certainly didn't give the students the same sense of randomness that the stack of names does. I did do something like concept testing though where I had them come up with answers to questions I posed on the board and then discuss them with a partner,

I think cold calling, in general, might be more beneficial for me to make sure I'm calling on students equally and not missing quiet ones or picking on ones who are spacing out. I haven't really gotten many complaints for just picking names which I would need to displace onto a sense of randomness; in fact, I got more lip when I used the real cold calling, but maybe that was because it was the first time.

I think much of this questioning strategy experiment wasn't that new for me so I didn't discover that much. The partner thing surprised me because it worked better than I expected. It worked even better today when I had a real protocol. It will work even better next time when I actually enforce that protocol. More generally, questions and questioning plays such an enormous part in my classroom anyway that trying out new questioning strategies wasn't really something I had to do for this assignment. It's what I try to do everyday anyway.