Hear from Engineering Prof. Harry Toups

Transcript

I use Socratic questioning during daily, but informal, conferences with student teams rotating the question and answer opportunities among TEAM members to ensure that all get a chance to practice speaking and to learn course content. Socratic questions have long been the mainstay of teachers trying to develop the critical thinking skills of their students, but it also helps to develop speaking skills as well. Instructors negotiating sometimes difficult terrain of teaching ESL students know this technique, but it works just as well in helping English proficient—but subject matter deficient—students to develop their speaking skills. Students struggle with the writing of a good summary for their final lab reports, they also struggle with generating robust assertion titles for their oral presentations supporting slides. We use a multi-step scaffolding approach to help students improve both these written objects. First, I model the creation of assertion titles by our starter semester workshop through a mock presentation to help students see what constitutes a robust assertion. Then the students build their own supporting slides for presentation of the workshop continuing problem, emulating my modeling. Finally, we asked the students to check the flow of these slide titles, to see that they make for a coherent presentation by constructing an abstract from those titles. Good titles and flow, good abstract. This abstract now serves as the nucleus for development of a full blown summary section for a final report.