Creating a confident competent questioning culture

Presentation at the 11th Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics (‘Brazil Delta 2017 for short)

Anne D’Arch-Warmington and Heather Lonsdale, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.

Get students into groups and do activities from day 1, minute 1. Within 2 weeks a community is built.

Get students into groups. Choose a scribe. They must only write questions raised by the group.

Share your questions with another group.

‘Think-aloud’ – make a commentary column next to your workings for answering a question. This makes you engage with the work in different ways.

Think-Pair-Share

• Think individually about the topic. It’s okay to just say “I have no clue”
• Pair with your partner.
• Share with your partner and then the class.

POGIL: Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning

• Each student assigned a role
• Take turns to try different roles
• Teacher observes and guides

Reciprocal teaching

• Students summarise, generate questions, clarify, predict on a topic they are going to cover.
• Marked on their explanation of the topic to the class, explaining on the board. Doesn’t matter if they got the explanation from Wikipedia.

Whiteboard tutorials

• ‘flipped’ tutorials
• Students engage with material
• Harder for tutors, you don’t know what students may ask on
• Students walk between groups to see what others are doing
• Students talk about the maths
• Ask students to explain why they did moves in their answer.

Oral assessment of problem solving

• When students are working on whiteboards.
• Ask What, When, Why

How do you encourage questioning in class?

Parting question:

Why is zero on a phone after number nine not before number one?