Procrastination Station

dailymeh:

Rick Garlikov taught a normally-gifted third grade class binary. By (almost) only asking questions. The advantages of this method are obvious:

It gives constant feed-back and thus allows monitoring of the students’ understanding as you go. So you know what problems and misunderstandings or lack of understandings you need to address as you are presenting the material. You do not need to wait to give a quiz or exam; the whole thing is one big quiz as you go, though a quiz whose point is teaching, not grading. Though, to repeat, this is teaching by stimulating students’ thinking in certain focused areas, in order to draw ideas out of them; it is not “teaching” by pushing ideas into students that they may or may not be able to absorb or assimilate. Further, by quizzing and monitoring their understanding as you go along, you have the time and opportunity to correct misunderstandings or someone’s being lost at the immediate time, not at the end of six weeks when it is usually too late to try to “go back” over the material. And in some cases their ideas will jump ahead to new material so that you can meaningfully talk about some of it “out of (your!) order” (but in an order relevant to them). (…)

If you can get the right questions in the right sequence, kids in the whole intellectual spectrum in a normal class can go at about the same pace without being bored; and they can “feed off” each others’ answers. Gifted kids may have additional insights they may or may not share at the time, but will tend to reflect on later.

This kind of learning seems to me (intuitively, as well as based on this anecdote) to be far superior to a passive, boring kind of learning, for the appropriate topics. Not every topic fits the Socratic method. There are some disadvantages, of course — primarily on the teacher’s end, not the students’. It’s hard to pick the right questions, the teacher must be smart in order to quickly come up with questions that logically lead to the right conclusion if the students do something unexpected, and so on:

These are the four critical points about the questions: 1) they must be interesting or intriguing to the students; they must lead by 2) incremental and 3) logical steps (from the students’ prior knowledge or understanding) in order to be readily answered and, at some point, seen to be evidence toward a conclusion, not just individual, isolated points; and 4) they must be designed to get the student to see particular points. You are essentially trying to get students to use their own logic and therefore see, by their own reflections on your questions, either the good new ideas or the obviously erroneous ideas that are the consequences of their established ideas, knowledge, or beliefs. Therefore you have to know or to be able to find out what the students’ ideas and beliefs are. You cannot ask just any question or start just anywhere.

It’s easy to get stuck:

In a less pure form, which is normally the way it occurs, students tend to get stuck at some point and need a teacher’s explanation of some aspect, or the teacher gets stuck and cannot figure out a question that will get the kind of answer or point desired, or it just becomes more efficient to “tell” what you want to get across. If “telling” does occur, hopefully by that time, the students have been aroused by the questions to a state of curious receptivity to absorb an explanation that might otherwise have been meaningless to them. Many of the questions are decided before the class; but depending on what answers are given, some questions have to be thought up extemporaneously. Sometimes this is very difficult to do, depending on how far from what is anticipated or expected some of the students’ answers are.

It’s a very interesting experiment, though intuition and one anecdote isn’t scientifically sound. Also, it shouldn’t be taken too far. It would be interesting to see how this would fare with more advanced ideas.

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