The Graduate School

Certificate of Accomplishment in Teaching ProgramWorkshop Reflection Assignment

Part I: Description The following information describes my second COAT workshop:

Title: Effective Questioning Techniques

Purpose: This workshop helped current and future instructors to consider their questioning techniques. The workshop helped us to analyze possible strategies and allowed us to practice some of the new techniques through a forum space.

Lead Presenter: Dr. Barbi Honeycutt

Date and Location: The course was offered online beginning Monday, November 1st.

Attendance: A good number of students attended the workshop; I am unsure of the exact number, but was appreciative of the group settings because the small groups were very functional and easier to manage than an all-course forum.

Description of the Event: The great thing about this workshop was that we were offered multiple ways to think about ideas for “questioning.” There were readings to help us consider effective strategies, but we also watched a video of an instructor as practice for analyzing this strategy. There were also forum post assignments; two of these forum posts focused on allowing students the chance to create their own questions using these techniques and to analyze the effectiveness of their questions (after someone volunteered an answer). This forum worked effectively and almost emulated a live workshop, which was great. Finally, there were additional extra resources that we were allowed to read or save for later as we had more questions about these strategies.

Part II: AnalysisThe following questions help me to describe my analysis of this event:

Why did you choose to attend this workshop? What were you hoping to learn?I choose to attend this workshop because, like many other instructors, I would like to foster engaging in-class discussions that help students to better understand the material and make deeper connections. While I try consistently to be an animated instructor, sometimes discussions work and sometimes they are less effective. As I’ve read more about active learning, I see how important student participation is to learning. I wanted to take this workshop in order to improve my questioning skills and develop tools to help jumpstart a stalled discussion; my hope is that this, in turn, will improve the effectiveness of active learning strategies in my classroom.

What assumptions did you have before participating in this workshop?When I first began to consider teaching, I had the assumption that the best instructors are lively, animated, amiable, and even a little bit “rock star.” I worried that my personality is not lively enough to foster the same kind of classroom environment that some of my favorite teachers from the past were able to foster. However, as I’ve learned more about teaching, I’ve realized that there are strategies you can employ that foster a great classroom—and they don’t involve rock star qualities or changes in your

personality. My assumption was that by taking this workshop I would find out more about an effective strategy to better my classroom environment.

Were your assumptions correct or incorrect? I feel that my assumptions were correct; this teaching strategy is another that shows with a good knowledge of successful pedagogical practices, an instructor can foster a creative and open classroom environment without making drastic personality changes or acting like a celebrity in the classroom.

What information was most meaningful for you? Be specific.The most meaningful information, to me, was the information about the different types of questions. While I knew there would be a review of questioning strategies, I had not previously considered the importance of question types. We reviewed Bloom’s Taxonomy in the Introduction to Teaching workshop, and I thought that was really well connected to these question types through the workshop questions. I look forward to using the resource that explains the question types again and again as I try to develop discussion strategies for future classes.

How do you think you will use this information? Be specific.My instructional style requires a bit of planning because I find I am less nervous when I have a course plan for each day. I hope to integrate a section specific to questions in my lesson plan. I currently try to devise some sort of active class activity, like a discussion or reflection activity, in order to integrate student participation, and I do think that this workshop will help me to improve that party of my teaching. However, I would also like to do a better job of planning the questions that I ask during the lecture portions of class. By planning ahead a bit by thinking about which types of questions I should ask, I can be better prepared with questions that students might actually respond to!

What information do you still need to learn related to this workshop? I think I still need to learn how to ask good questions on the fly. My students have, in the past, latched onto certain discussions and taken the discussions to really interesting and beneficial places. However, I find that as the discussion veers away from what I thought we would discuss and goes into new territory, I am less prepared with questions. I think that practicing these question strategies more will help to prepare me for these situations so that, in the future, I can do a better job of asking discussion questions that foster continued conversation about topics.