Last class, we carried out an exercise that I think should be a staple in education.

The instructor explained the concept of self-directed conferences and asked us all to submit an idea. One by one we jotted something down (a discussion topic) and brought it to the front. Following this, everyone posted a dot on the subject that piqued their interest.

To my surprise, my idea ended up being one of several that was selected. As a fairly shy person, once the group gathered I asked one of the group members to take over the reigns of the discussion. But I soon found myself wanting to get in on the action and began asking questions of my own.

As with many large group activities, the discussion was a bit unwieldy, and I had to do my best to focus it on the task at hand, to generate specific ideas on the somewhat controversial topic being discussed.

I ended up getting a giant thrill from this. I felt that it really drew on my background as a reporter, as I jotted down in bullet point form what everyone in the group was expressing.

Going forward, I think I will definitely utilise this concept — of having a classroom generate topics they want to discuss.

For one thing, the Social Studies curriculum is very open ended, largely listing broad occurrences in History, rather than providing a prescribed curriculum for students to follow. For example, an instructor may be asked to teach about a coup d’etat in a certain grade, rather a specific coup d’etat. There is built in flexibility, making it easy to tap your classroom.

I can foresee myself asking mt students to submit specific coup d’etat’s for discussion, and then voting on their favourite. (This may involve a bit of prompting, not sure how many of them they may know about… but you get what I mean.)

The other place I could see this working is in reviewing material. Rather than simply have students re-read their notes, why not ask them to work together to generate questions about what they study, and then answer this question with the material they have learned?

According to a recent edutopia article, this can have terrific outcomes for students. The article looked at a study in which 82 university students were assigned to three groups. One of the groups employed the aforementioned method (employing a study question). It ended up scoring significantly higher than the other groups. You can read the full study here.

This to me isn’t all that surprising. Allowing students the opportunity to generate their own questions and then pursue it doggedly is a recipe for success.

  • Joel