So, today I did a rather adventurous activity with my Year 10 science class involving mixed ability grouping, student-directed activities and a peer-assessment survey to follow up. One of the things I did in the peer-assessment survey was ask about how well I did. Specifically, I asked how well I explained my instructions, how well I explained the content, and how well I responded to questions.
After seeing these results, I am doing a little reflection on how I actually do respond to questions. Two of the three groups gave me an unfavourable ranking for my question-response skills.
My default, whenever I am asked a process question (like, "how do I fold this paper?"), or even a content question, is to refer them to someone who is successfully doing the process or task. My view is that students should turn to each other for advice, so long as the questions are appropriately difficult for them. If no one gets it, then I am definitely at fault and should explain. Otherwise, they can work collaboratively to find answers, and this includes asking someone else for help on what a word means or what a question is asking for.
But it occurred to me that students still think that teachers are the founts of all knowledge and that an answer from me is 'better' than an answer from a classmate, even if the content if exactly the same.
Since I don't want to have to answer the same questions fifty million times, I guess I have to take some action. Here are some thoughts:
1. Work on my instructions. In particular, make better use of bullet points and short, sequential sentences in a list rather than a short, paragraph-style set of instructions
2. For each class, assign two or three people (in a rotating roster) who will be experts on explaining tasks. Then the role can be filled by people who have a good track record on understanding the type of task we're doing that day
3. Do more examples and modelling and make more use of templates
I shall continue thinking on this and making improvements.
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