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Reflection: Effective Questioning Techniques CoAT Workshop
Reflection: Effective Questioning Techniques CoAT Workshop
Reflection: Effective Questioning Techniques CoAT Workshop
Part I: Description
The following information describes my second COAT workshop:
Purpose: This workshop helped current and future instructors to consider their questioning techniques.
The workshop helped us to analyze possible strategies and allowed us to practice some of the new
techniques through a forum space.
Date and Location: The course was offered online beginning Monday, November 1 st.
Attendance: A good number of students attended the workshop; I am unsure of the exact number, but was
appreciative of the group settings because the small groups were very functional and easier to manage
than an all-course forum.
Description of the Event: The great thing about this workshop was that we were offered multiple ways to
think about ideas for “questioning.” There were readings to help us consider effective strategies, but we
also watched a video of an instructor as practice for analyzing this strategy. There were also forum post
assignments; two of these forum posts focused on allowing students the chance to create their own
questions using these techniques and to analyze the effectiveness of their questions (after someone
volunteered an answer). This forum worked effectively and almost emulated a live workshop, which was
great. Finally, there were additional extra resources that we were allowed to read or save for later as we
had more questions about these strategies.
Why did you choose to attend this workshop? What were you hoping to learn?
I choose to attend this workshop because, like many other instructors, I would like to foster engaging in-
class discussions that help students to better understand the material and make deeper connections. While
I try consistently to be an animated instructor, sometimes discussions work and sometimes they are less
effective. As I’ve read more about active learning, I see how important student participation is to learning.
I wanted to take this workshop in order to improve my questioning skills and develop tools to help
jumpstart a stalled discussion; my hope is that this, in turn, will improve the effectiveness of active
learning strategies in my classroom.