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Question design: [one question] [purposes] [contingent sessions] [feedback] [whole sessions]

Designing and managing a teaching session

Any session or lecture can be thought of as having 3 aspects, all of which ideally will be well managed. If you are designing a new kind of session (e.g. with handsets) you may want to think about these aspects explicitly. They are:

• The narrative or story-telling aspect. Even for a passive audience member, this is the bit that lets them feel the session hangs together as an event, and how it connects to other bits of the course. A session that is entirely a sequence of questions, whether created by the presenter or from the audience, lacks this. On this depends the audience's sense of smoothness and good organisation. Real learning may actually not depend much on this.
  Techniques include having an agenda, relating each part, or each question from the audience, to the overall purpose, ending with a summing up, etc.

• Social feeling. In particular, whether anyone feels it is OK to ask a question or make a comment is very sensitive to this. Precedent both within the session, the course, and the university are all important to whether and which people feel OK about asking.
  If you want people to participate in this way then you could: ask them questions to elicit oral responses, start with a question that is easy and unstressful to answer, etc. If questions or answers are helpful, always say so; if not, say why not (while in many cases also saying thank you that they were prepared to volunteer something at all), ... A technique used entirely to create the right precedent is to ask everyone to stand up; then only those to sit down who think the answer to this question is X ...

• Individual processing. Learning may depend almost entirely on the time spent on individual mental processing. In most cases, a frighteningly tiny proportion of the audience's time is spent on this. Answering a handset question means they spend at least 5 secs on this (for an easy question), or perhaps a minute or two for a hard question. If they discuss the reasons for choosing an answer, they spend more. (But listening to someone else answer a question orally often leads to no real processing; taking dictation, none; finding the right place on a handout, again none; etc.)

Feedback to the presenter

• Do the audience understand? Can ask, orally or by handset. But in fact, it isn't always easy for students to be sure. So a test question is often useful to them, as well as to the presenter, in discovering whether they do understand.
• When to stop a discussion: when have they made up their minds and are just chatting. A presenter can see a few groups not speaking any more: that is one sign. They can walk round the room and ask a few groups if they have finished discussing.
• Are all the responses now in? The total on the PRS screen is a fairly good guide to this.
• How easy was a question? In a large group (e.g. 150), answers come in with a long tail (Poisson?) distribution. The sign of an easy question (that only requires a second or two to decide): the first answers come immediately and continue to register fast until 2/3rds are registered. A hard question leads to only a few being registered at first, and a slower, steadier, flow.

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