“I don’t really teach. I have slides, but they have questions on them and I stand there in silence until the students answer the questions. And then I ask more questions.” This is how Arshi Shaikh, Assistant Professor of Social Development Studies at Renison University College, describes her experience in the classroom, teaching SOCWK 301R—Understanding Diversity in Canada.
It’s a course that students must take before beginning the Bachelor of Social Work, and in the classroom it’s as much about challenging their own assumptions and listening to their classmates’ experiences as it is about learning the “facts” about diversity and demographics in Canada. Our challenge was to redevelop it in a fully online format, to make it available to more students.
Arshi had plenty of content, including an optional textbook that could tell students everything they needed to know about race, class, sexual orientation, religion, disability, and gender in Canada, but how could we capture the Socratic questioning in an online course that she did in the classroom that was so crucial to her students’ experience?
One of the things that is so valuable about Socratic questioning is the questioner’s ability to keep pursuing a thread, asking questions and continuing down a particular line of reasoning or experience. Equally valuable is the opportunity for others in the classroom to hear their peers’ experiences: even if they’re not speaking up, they’re listening and challenging their own views based on what others are saying. The synchronous nature of questions and answers in a large group was beyond the abilities of an asynchronous online course; we simply couldn’t reproduce the real-time exchanges of the classroom, nor did we want to.
But sharing with the whole class is only part of what works in Arshi’s method: even if only 10-20% of her students spoke up in class during any given session, all students were able to hear the questions and answer them in their own minds. They were able to sort out their ideas before they learned “the” answer, in a low-stakes environment
For the online course, she needed a way to encourage students to think for themselves before reading their peers’ answer. Without the built-in pause of the instructor’s silence in a classroom, we had to find another way.
We kept as our goal the emphasis on students generating their own ideas. The Centre for Extended Learning’s programming team built the Socratic Questioning/Student-Generated Content Tool (SQ/SGCT) and put it on dozens of pages in the course. It consists of a title and prompt question (“What is discrimination?” “Identify a dominant group and a subordinate group in Canadian society.” “Why study religion?” “What is race? What is ethnicity?” etc.).
Below the question is a text box where students can enter their ideas and hit Submit. The answers are saved and students can review (and/or edit) them when they come back to the page. The answers are not submitted to the instructor; they’re a tool to facilitate the student’s own reflection and note-taking (although the tool is designed to allow submission of responses for grading if desired).
It made me think about the lecture content before entering the lecture, so very useful from that viewpoint.
Once students hit Submit (irrespective of what they typed into the box), the rest of the page content appears. We’ve discovered that most students hit Submit without entering any notes, although a few students took copious notes (and in fact, complained that the 5000-character text box limit was too restrictive).
Some students didn’t even visit the pages. Such is the way with all instructional material and all instructional events: we can design an experience and encourage students to engage with the material, the instructor, and each other, but at the end of the day, the student chooses how much effort he or she puts in.
We should also emphasize that there were two hurdles for students to overcome: using the tool, as embedded in the LEARN course pages, but also, using reflection and generating their own content as a learning strategy. Arshi reports that in the classroom, where there is no technical hurdle, students still take a while to get used to her Socratic questioning style: it brings them out of their comfort zone, and while they may recognize the value of it, it does take some getting used to.
When asked if they referenced their notes when preparing their assignments, one student reported “[Yes, for] mostly all of the reflection activities and discussion posts.”
Future plans for this tool include a study where students are randomly assigned to a section that uses the SQ/SGCT and one that doesn’t, to determine whether those who use the tool perform better on assignments. For now, we are continuing to implement the SQ/SGCT in a few courses, confident that giving students a pause and an opportunity to reflect and to generate their own ideas before being told the answers is a valuable instructional strategy.