Month: April 2020

Strategies for questioning when you are having difficulty learning names

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Part of my ongoing philosophy as an educator is that my teaching is the natural intersection of my technical skills as a computer scientist and the social and pedagogical skills that I have nurtured throughout my own education and employment. Indeed, many of my own teachers and lecturers positively remarked at my communicative ability and that I would repeatedly take on the role of a facilitator in group conversations and activities without prompt.

Now that the tables have turned and I am the one providing students with positive remarks, why do I now have difficulties with producing effective questions, and why am I having difficulty learning the names of my students now, when learning names was something I did so seamlessly before?

Identifying the problem

In my first formal observation, whilst the feedback was overall very positive, one of my suggestions for improvement was in the use of effective questioning for Assessment of Learning, and to improve questioning technique – the observing staff explained that not being able to call on students directly by name was a clear hindrance, as broadly questioning the class and hoping for volunteers is something to be avoided, whereas conversely pointing at students or otherwise picking on them in an impersonal way can break the rapport that you are desperately attempting to establish. I made efforts to learn names (with some success), especially with my younger groups and this has been acknowledged in later informal observations, but there was still a clear area of weakness – an area that needed deeper investigation and reference to literature to mitigate in order to improve my pedagogical approach.

Motivations for improvement

The first things to consider before launching an investigation, is why should I bother? Based on written and programmed work that I had students complete for me and talking to them in class, the vast majority of students appeared to be learning well; keeping up with their counterpart students who continued to be taught by a qualified teacher. It is well documented that teachers have a ridiculously high workload, something which parents are beginning to understand as they have been forced to home-school their own children in light of the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic (Trafford, 2020), so is it prudent to make potentially significant changes?

Of course, this is where teachers can look to professional standards for guidance. For a post-compulsory educator such as myself, those undersigned by the Education & Training Foundation (2014) are clear, and meet the criteria for PS1, 2, 8, 9, and 10 as reflective practice is being used in conjunction with educational research to further develop my own teaching, with strong regard being taken to the impact it has on my students’ learning.

Investigation and mitigation

As I had the opportunity to meet with the programme director for my course to have a chat about how I was getting on as a trainee teacher, I brought up that I was having difficulties with questioning and memorising names so that I could be pointed in the right direction. She pointed me in the direction of Ross McGill, author of the popular Teacher Toolkit and is even regarded as one of the most influential ‘gurus’ in contemporary teaching. (Lightfoot, 2019)

One of the most discussed style of questioning discussed on the website is ‘fermi questioning’, a strategy developed by physicist Enrico Fermi to help develop creative thinking and problem solving abilities in his students – leaving out details and absolutes to encourage approximation and ‘guestimation’, as well as to foster interest and curiosity in the subject at hand. (McGill, 2018)

Suggested further reading lead me to the Questioning Technique Pocketbook by Gorden Pope. Therein Pope (2013) suggests that this questioning methodology additionally allows for easier identification of a pupil’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) and whether they are able to carry out tasks and carry out concepts independently.

Having assimilated this technique into my teaching repertoire, I still needed to come up with a solution to learning names and hopefully factoring this into my questioning usage. Thankfully, I came across another topic that appears to be surrounded in a remarkable amount of controversy: the use of lollipop sticks.

According to Dabell (2018), many educational researchers and teachers do not like the idea of using lollipop sticks to select pupils for questioning as it flies in the face of effective questioning, and shared a remark that if a teacher needs to use pseudo-randomisation in order to avoid unconscious prejudice or biases from forming in their selection process, they ‘need a sabbatical and a career adviser’.

Controversy aside, many teachers appear to use this strategy. I would argue that such a technique could be nevertheless a useful addition to my own toolkit when working with a class I am unfamiliar with, albeit one used with caution and should not be depended upon as a real substitute for learning names. I believe that using such a system to ensure student participation is inherently not a bad thing, but if a teacher is only using them to appease senior management observations then it becomes no more than a vapid fad that does not have impact on students’ learning at heart.

Implementation and final reflections

In my future teaching I will look to plan fermi-style questions into my lesson plans in advance in order to better assess my students’ learning; ensuring that I give them plenty of time to digest and even discuss their thoughts with those around them, and placing more focus on the thinking process rather than the answers themselves. Hopefully with time I will be able to more spontaneously produce such open-ended, thought-provoking questions in all aspects of my teaching.

In regards to lollipop sticks, I will use them in any classes I start out with as a means to learn names and to gamify the introduction process. After much consideration however, I think that teachers have a responsibility to familiarise themselves with their students, including their names and likenesses, on an individual basis to help support their learning journey as much as possible. Sometimes things take time and practice, and that includes getting to know your students.

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How I collate feedback from my students and colleagues

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Continuous improvement is a fundamental aspect of my teaching and learning philosophy – a notion referred to frequently in the business world as ‘kaizen’, loaned from Japanese. While it might not necessarily directly translate into teaching, it is a notion to consider since we as teachers are always looking for new ways to improve with the goal of benefiting education as a whole. In addition, some studies such as that by Suárez-Barraza et al (2015) have looked directly into what classrooms can learn from this operations management methodology.

In order to make improvements, it is important for data, typically in the form of feedback, to be collected from your students, as well as fellow staff members who observe you, in order to identify areas that are potentially problematic and to create action plans to address them accordingly. In addition, such data can bring to light what you as a teacher are doing well, and how you can not only make any additional improvements to that but share that those methods and recommendations back with your school and fellow classmates, as recommended by professional standards 19 and 20 indicated for teachers/lecturers in Further Education. (Education & Training Foundation, 2014)

Gathering data from students

Naturally, the most obvious way to get feedback from students is to talk to them informally, or even just to listen to remarks that they say to you or those you overhear as you perambulate your classroom. Much of what is said can give you indicators of what is going well, and many students are more than happy to vocalise how they feel regarding your teaching or the lessons you have set up for them. In my own experience, some of my students have been more than happy to outright tell me that they like or dislike something, or in other cases how they have found something challenging or tedious – I keep a note of these trends so that I can make further improvements and small modifications where necessary.

In one such case with a Year 13 group, I addressed feedback briefly as part of the next class and incorporated it into both the lesson plan and resources (i.e. the PowerPoint presentation) and gave time for further constructive discussion.

At other times, more written or formal methods can be called upon, a favourite of mine is to use exit tickets. While it is a formative assessment tool and its primary purpose is to gauge what students have learned in a class, often by answering brief questions or listing things that they have learned, additional spaces for feedback can also be useful. (George Lucas Educational Foundation, 2015)

A further method that I was recommended to use by my former advisor was to use sticky notes in a similar fashion; requesting that students fill them in at some point during the class when inspiration hit them, or at the very least before leaving in a similar vein to an exit note. Feedback gathered in this way for some of my Level 3 IT classes proved demonstrated that how I was teaching was both interesting and engaging, but for some students, they remarked it was too easy. It’s noted by Quigley that it’s a great system for actually providing feedback to your students in a silent, passer-by manner also in addition to an opportunity for pupils to provide anonymised feedback. (Quigley, 2012)

Gathering data from colleagues

I am fortunate at my host institution to have colleagues who will informally observe all sessions that I deliver, and provide written feedback in the form of a shared document afterwards; allowing me the opportunity to produce action plans and make revisions or immediate improvements for the next session, sometimes of which is the very next day.

Additional forms of feedback data include those recorded in formal observations in document templates provided by the university, termly meetings with my school mentor, and informal department discussions. These are commonly reflected upon in my post-class reflection documents.

Final thoughts and reflections

Whilst the data I collect from my students and fellow members of staff are immensely useful in improving my own teaching in a ‘kaizenesque’ manner, both in my methodology and in my resources or plans, I acknowledge that they are mostly empirical and qualitative in nature, and do not provide a great deal of statistical information on how I might infer better choices and improvements.

I believe that as a professional and reflective practitioner I am obliged to continuously reflect upon my own practice, particularly in conjunction with feedback received in order to further better myself and to maximise the impact I have on my own students. Further research into data/feedback methodologies is the next step I should look to undertake in order to expand these toolsets further, which will become increasingly important as I become a fully qualified teacher, and must fulfil various targets and requirements, of which themselves will almost definitely be numerical in nature.

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