At Lesley this year, I've been working extensively with other faculty building their online courses and blended learning online activities. One area I work on often is designing good questions for dialogue. They might start out with a "yes" or "no" question, or one that only has a few relevant responses and I will ask, "What do you imagine will happen in this dialgoue?" and "How will you know if the learning outcomes you have in mind for this dialogue activity will be achieved (what evidence of key ideas will you look for in their conversation)?"
Once a generative question is developed -- one that includes much interesting room for dialogue and specific learning goals -- we look at how to frame the discussion activity in order to encourage the most dialogue possible without additional instructor intervention. Over time, a number of my colleagues and I have used a wiki to develop some ideas around how to frame discussion activities to optimize student interaction. Here is what we have so far:
Discussion assignment template: (developed for week 6 math discussion)
Read your classmates' initial comments. Respond to at least two of their ideas in separate posts. In developing your responses consider:
- What comments could you make or questions could you raise that would deepen or move the conversation forward?
- What among these posts was particularly helpful or interesting to you and why?
- What ideas require more clarification? Pose questions that will help to clarify any points that are not clear.
- What insights did you gain from reflecting on this work through the eyes of your colleagues?
- What new questions arose and what questions remain?
A set of questions such as the above offers a variety of entrypoints. They may not stand alone very well, they are intended to be a combined set. The first one encourages contributions that add to the quality of the dialogue contents. The second one embeds complimenting ones' peers for contributions that helped others, building confidence as well as making intellectual connections. The fourth one is the "consumerist" entrypoint, and has value among others in that the additional comments offer a meta view that may spark additional thinking and connecting. The final one is a synthesis question that encourages comments that keep the dialogue open, rather than close it up as if exploration were complete.
Here's a stand alone:
In developing your responses, think about how you can help our group deepen our connections between our work this week and classroom applications.
The following are some specific action-oriented prompts that will directly support co-construction of understanding or knowledge:
Identify disagreements - help with resolution
Identify commonalities, find common threads
Identify different approaches. How many can we find?
Come to a consensus (this is a difficult assignment in a threaded discussion, but could be reflected in a collaborative product, such as a wiki)
Create a common list or statement or response to someone (a product)
Identify next steps, extensions, unanswered questions
Challenge ideas you think are not correct. - by asking questions.
If someone makes a claim but does not justify it - ask for justification (I would change that one to:) Can you add any evidence that might help justify or refute a claim?
Identify problem solving strategies - look for new strategies.
Identify approaches (solutions, representations) that you had not thought of
Here's another stand alone:
Respond to at least two ideas included in the posts. In developing your response think about common threads and help to identify big ideas.
We're still building our list. Have you found a framework that works in your context? Hope you'll share it here.
Keywords: questions for dialogue
