Among important skills for teachers, those of listening, asking and answering questions and responding are paramount in small group settings.
Questioning
The skills of asking and answering questions are not as simple as they might appear.
Many general teaching and social skills communication texts deal with the skill of questioning (see e.g. Brown and Atkins, 1988). Good questioning techniques require continuing preparation, practice and reflection by students and teachers alike. Preparation of a repertoire of questions in advance will allow the teacher to work effectively and flexibly in the small group. Similarly, student-to-student interactions in groups is enhanced if students prepare questions at the outset or end of a class. The confidence of students is often boosted through preparation of content in the form of key and incisive questions on a topic.
The type of question asked is also linked to promoting or inhibiting learning. Questions may be categorised in different ways, such as:
Open Closed
Broad Reflective Narrow Recall
Clear Probing Confused Superficial
Simple Divergent Complex Convergent
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Interrogating practice
How do you usually ask questions? Look at the list and see which categories your questions usually fit into.
Make a list of probing questions relevant to an important concept in your subject.
How you ask questions is important in fostering student responses. Body language displaying an indifferent, aggressive, closed or anxious manner will be less effective. An open, warm, challenging or sensitive manner may gain more responses of a thoughtful nature.
The above activity concentrates on your reactions to student questions. Some of these reactions may result in students being able to answer their own questions. However, there will be times when you will directly answer the question. Directly answering questions during a group meeting takes less time than attempting to encourage the student or group to come up with the answers. If you choose to answer directly, make your answer brief and to the point. After responding, you may wish to check that you have really answered the question by saying something like: ‘Does that answer your question?’
The timing of asking questions and the use of pause and silence are also important in developing the skills of answering and asking questions. Taking these matters into consideration may in part address the common problem teachers in higher education report – that students do not contribute during small group sessions.
Listening
The mental process of listening is an active one that calls into play a number of thinking functions including analysis, comprehension, synthesis and evaluation. Genuine listening also has an emotional dimension since it requires an ability to share, and quite possibly understand, another person’s feelings, and to understand his or her situation.
Intellectual and emotional meanings are communicated by the listener and speaker in both verbal and non-verbal forms. Thus how you listen will be observable through gestures and body language. Your listening skills may be developed by thinking about all the levels of a student’s comment in this way:
• what is said: the content;
• how it is said: tone and feelings;
• when it is said: time and priority;
• where it is said: place and environment.
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Interrogating practice
When you are asked a question by a student, what are some of the things you can do other than directly answering the question?
Teaching and learning in small groups ❘ 83
Listening attentively to individual students in the group and to the group’s mood will heighten your ability to respond. This may demand that you practise silence; if you persevere you will find this an attainable skill through which remarkable insights can be gained.
Responding
Listening in silence by paying undivided attention to the speaker is an active process, engaging and heightening awareness and observation. The other aspect of positive listening is of course to intervene in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. The more intense our listening is, the more likely it is that we will know how to respond, when to respond and in what ways.
There are many ways of responding and many reasons for responding in a certain way.
Appropriate responses are usually made when the tutor has considered not only the cognitive aims of the session but also the interpersonal needs of the group and the individual learner’s level of confidence and knowledge. Different responses will have different consequences for the individual student and for the behaviour of the group as a whole. Therefore, an appropriate response can only be deemed appropriate in the context of the particular small group teaching session.
OVERVIEW
This chapter has considered a selection of appropriate group methods; mentioned a range of group formats; referred to individual and group behaviour; and offered an opportunity for teachers and learning support staff to consider how they might develop and enhance their practice, including by offering suggestions for further reading.
Interrogating practice
Consider how much time you spend listening to students and encouraging students to listen to one another.
Interrogating practice
Along with a small group of colleagues, determine what skills you might usefully develop to increase effectiveness as a facilitator of groups.
REFERENCES
Abercrombie, M (1970) Aims and Techniques of Group Teaching, SRHE, London.
Adair, J (1996) Effective Motivation, Pan, London.
Bligh, D (ed.) (1986) Teaching Thinking by Discussion, SRHE and NFER Nelson, Guildford.
Boud, D, Cohen, R and Sampson, J (2001) Peer Learning in Higher Education, Learning From and With Each Other,Kogan Page, London.
Brown, G and Atkins, M (1988) Effective Teaching in Higher Education, Routledge, London.
Griffiths, S and Partington, P (1992) Enabling Active Learning in Small Groups: Module 5 in Effective Learning and Teaching in Higher Education,UCoSDA/CVCP, Sheffield.
Griffiths, S, Houston, K and Lazenbatt, A (1996) Enhancing Student Learning through Peer Tutoring in Higher Education,University of Ulster, Coleraine.
Habeshaw, S, Habeshaw, T and Gibbs, G (1988) 53 Interesting Things to Do in your Seminars and Tutorials(3rd edn) Technical and Educational Services Ltd, Bristol.
Higher Education Academy (2007) website ,www.heacademy.ac.uk.; access the case studies by going to the website and tapping on Resources (last accessed August 2007).
Jaques, D and Salmon, G (2006) Learning in Groups: A Handbook for Face-to-face and Online Environments,Taylor & Francis, London.
Korda, M (1976) Power in the Office, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Luker, P (1989) Academic staff development in universities with special reference to small group teaching (unpublished Ph.D. thesis), University of Nottingham.
Rudduck, J (1978) Learning Through Small Group Discussion, SRHE, University of Surrey.
Stenhouse, L (1972) Teaching through small group discussion: formality, rules and authority, Cambridge Journal of Education,2 (1): 18–24.
Tuckmann, B (1965) Developmental sequences in small groups, Psychological Bulletin, 63 (6):
384–399.
Watson, L (2007) Personal communication, June.
FURTHER READING
Griffiths, S and Partington, P (1992) See above. An in-depth look at the topic. Useful interactive exercises and video to highlight skills.
Habeshaw, S, Habeshaw, T and Gibbs, G (1988) See above. Very useful for practical advice and activities.
Jaques, D and Salmon, G (2006 ) See above. Wide ranging, authoritative and up to date.
Race, P and Brown, S (2002) The ILTA Guide, Inspiring Learning about Teaching and Assessment, ILT in association with Education Guardian, York. Contains a lively and practical section on small group learning and teaching.
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E-learning – an introduction
Sam Brenton
INTRODUCTION
The aims of this chapter are: to consider what we mean by e-learning; to give practical advice about approaches to e-learning; to introduce practitioners to key tools and technologies for use in effective e-learning; and to provide an overview of current issues in e-learning and direct the reader to further sources of information.
CONTEXT
Like the printing press, like mechanical flight, gunpowder, the telegraph, the telephone, the microchip, radio and television, the internet is a transformative technology. Across the planet, the World Wide Web is changing the way we do things, and allowing us to do things we could not do before. It is transforming the way we access information, enabling networks of interest and communities of practice to flourish across physical distance with an immediacy and breadth that were impossible less than a generation ago.
There is informed speculation that it is changing the way in which today’s younger generation learn and communicate, and the way they construct, not just their social networks, but their identities as social beings (e.g. Turkle, 1995).
The Web presents a challenge for formal education. In an age where there is ubiquitous access to high-quality content (once you know where to find it, how to spot it, or how to make it yourself), and where people can seek out and communicate with experts, practitioners and learners in any discipline, what becomes of our role as teachers, what are our libraries for, and what remains special about the physically situated learning communities of academe? Independent, non-formal education between people using the Web is occurring on an unprecedented scale across the globe. So the question we ask now is no longer ‘does e-learning work?’, but rather: how can we, in the formal, guided process of higher education, use the power and potential of recent electronic media to enable our students to learn better, from us, from each other and independently?
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