Barry Sharpe from Western Governors University gave a thought provoking recorded talk at the Lilly Conference I was able to watch tonight as Amada fell asleep. Sharpe invokes Socrates and the teacher as a gadfly and midwife to encourage us to use practice questions that push students to overcome desirable difficulties and self-reflect on their learning. Sharpe went over an example of a question without multiple choices and explained how to scaffold information in subsequent slides to help students but also promote retrieval practice and generation of responses. An example if a multiple-choice question designed to make students connect knowledge by including familiar options and a new scenario made me think about questions we can ask in the courses I teach. The idea of the question workspace to work on responses is a great way to model and exercise what we expect students to do in higher shakes assessments. The presentation ended with how Sharpe uses a post assessment survey inspired by exam wrappers to provoke meta cognition and self examination of study habits. One of the survey questions asks students whether they used self quizzing without notes or using a blank page. I also appreciate the emphasis on the instructor pausing to work with students on these practice questions so they develop these important skills. Essentially, Sharpe uses a modified Socratic questioning method with added scaffolding and prompts for self awareness of what study practices participants are using. I hope I can use this and pause, even in video recordings as Sharpe did, to allow learners to generate ideas and reflect on their learning process.
