Ask better questions

There is a new blog, intended for K–12 math teachers, that is dedicated to “trying to get a little bit better at questioning”: https://betterqs.wordpress.com/

I read a number of math-teacher blogs, even though I’ve not taught a math course since Spring 2003 (Honors Applied Discrete Math), because a lot of the teaching discussion is relevant to what I do teach. I also read some physics teacher blogs, for the same reason.

It would be nice if there were blogs discussing precisely the same courses and teaching challenges that I face, but I don’t know if there is anyone else in the world who teaches the same eclectic mix of courses that I do. Last year I taught a first-year grad course on bioinformatics, a how-to-be-a-grad-student course, a freshman design seminar for bioengineers, a senior thesis writing course, a grad course on assembling the banana-slug genome (co-taught with another faculty member), and a lecture/lab course on applied electronics.  Over the decades I’ve been a professor, I’ve created and taught courses on an even wider range than that, including bicycle transportation engineering, desktop publishing, VLSI design, technical writing, digital synthesis of music, and most of the core computer engineering courses. At the moment, I don’t see myself creating any more new courses before I retire, unless I can hand off some of the existing courses to younger faculty.

The “better at questioning” theme of betterqs.wordpress.com is an interesting one for a teacher blog, as it focuses on one rather narrow aspect of teaching, but is open to a diversity of different subjects, different age ranges for the students, and different teaching styles.  I’ve considered joining that blog as a contributor (it is open to any teacher, I believe), but I’m not sure how much I have to say about asking questions that is relevant to the math teachers who are the main audience.

I have much less time with students than K–12 teachers do (35 hours for a standard course, 95 for my intense Applied Electronics lecture+lab course), so I don’t have the luxury of slowly developing a classroom culture—I fully expect some students to still be uncomfortable with the way I teach even at the end of the course, though I attempt to get them to buy into the main purposes of the course within the first few hours of class time.

My goal in lecture classes is not to ask questions, but to get students to ask me questions—I’d rather that they figured out what they needed to know, rather than me trying to guess what holes they have based on what they get wrong on questions. I’m also not very interested in what students can do in 30 seconds—I want to know what they can do if they have adequate time to think and to look things up, so in-class questions don’t tell me much about what students need.  I rely on week-long homework and papers to do that.

I mainly use in-class questions to keep students engaged in the class—asking for the next step in a derivation, for example—rather than to test their knowledge or understanding. Since engagement is my goal, I don’t generally ask students who raise their hands, but do cold calling—selecting students randomly after asking the question.

Questions in the lab are a different matter. There I’m either trying to understand what the student is attempting (“What is the corner frequency you were trying to get?”) or prompting them to learn to do debugging (“Where is your circuit schematic?” “Have you compared your wiring to your schematic?” “What voltage did you expect to see there?”).