Blog Post 7: Reflection on Week 6 Class and on Week 7 Readings

I think the increase of group discussions and seminar-like courses have really enhanced my learning experiences throughout my years in university because they foster discussions that make you think about how you interpret material compared to how others with different experiences do. That is why I found this class so helpful in helping me to understand how different approaches to group discussions can have different effects on the outcomes. With the LEO exercise, I found it helpful to see that I mostly aligned in thinking with most of the people that shared the objective I had had, but I found it more helpful to understand the reading from the various perspectives of our jigsaw group. One of the points that our group made was that by approaching a text in this way, we were forced to think in a different way, due to the objective of our LEO, which led to some interesting revelations, but discussions with others that had gone through similar ways of thinking for various objectives provided even more perspectives for us to think about. These varying roles led to open discussions not only about the text but about the approach to these perspectives and the issues that some had with them because of how they think as individuals.

I think that these small groups prior to large class discussions also allow for more voices to be heard because we are more comfortable working out our confusions in smaller groups which can give us confidence to speak to the group at large and those that do not feel comfortable in speaking to the big group often catch the attention of others in smaller groups, which allows for their thoughts to still be heard. Our final discussion about the readings in the small group really opened up how even groups of five or six can have greatly varying perspectives on the same information. It was also interesting to see which questions fostered decent amounts of discussion while others seemed to just fall dead.

I think my largest issue with Marc Prensky’s article is that he seems to disregard some of the issues that arise with going all-digital in a university because his major example for said position did not go through. While Prensky’s argument was valid when he made it in 2011 about South Korea planning to go fully electronic with their textbooks by 2015, the country reneged from this stance just four months after Prensky made his post. I think that some of Prensky’s ideas would be extremely interesting in a learning environment if they could be implemented, I spent most of the article questioning what access would look like in this digital university and how such collaborations would work as time passed. He seemed to dismiss the argument about screen fatigue in his article as well, which seemed like an interesting thing to do. I am one of those people that prefers to read on paper, not because I get some nostalgia from doing so as he would suggest, but because reading constantly from a screen gives me migraines and I tend to remember more reading from paper than I do from a screen. Now, I have actively worked against this to consume more information electronically, but I still hold that paper has an important place in higher education still.

Another example he used to bolster his argument laid with the surge of electronic materials in comparison to print materials being created and distributed. While it is true that these electronic sources caused a dip in print productions for several years, recently print materials have made a resurgence. Still, my thoughts go back to access regardless. At the end of this article I was left with the following questions:

• What about when students leave the university?
• On most campuses, when alumni leave the university connectivity privileges are revoked or, at least, come at a fee. Would this trend be altered in this all-digital university?
• If a campus is truly going digital, and replacing physical books with electronic versions, are they also providing equal access to devices for students to use?

Interested in learning more about the Socratic Seminar, I read the following readings from the provided selection: Metzger ,1998, “Teaching Reading: Beyond the Plot; Tredway, 1995, “Socratic Seminars.” Educational Leadership; Chowning. 2005, “Socratic Seminars in Science Class.” HHS Public Access. I think it was helpful to see how these three readings worked and referenced one another because they continuously built on the same idea to provide a fuller picture of how such seminars could be helpful in the classroom and how they could properly be conducted by an instructor. While I have been in courses where seminar-like discussions are the norm, the type of structuring introduced in the Socratic Seminar is not one that is fully familiar to me. I think that many of these discussion-based classes strived for this type of learning, but, for many reasons, fell short of the goal because they did not know how to adapt when something wasn’t working.

I seemed to take one main idea from each of these readings and a fuller understanding of the Socratic Seminar as a whole from the culmination of the three. From Metzger, I found the idea of the inner and outer circle to hold an interesting place. “Peer pressure worked in the favor of education” by not only providing formative feedback but by enhancing the ability to take notes and comment on how to improve while allowing students to hold one another responsible for work and to guide class in a way that their needs were met (Metzger, 243). Tredway emphasized how this could work by discussing the key of the Socratic Seminar: focusing on the “why.” By focusing on motivation and emotion, these types of discussions allow for students to connect to the ideas more fully and enables them to mature as students. Still, neither of these would be helpful if it weren’t for Chowning’s comment about remaining in the realm of evidence-based reasoning. Motivation, emotion, and peer observation are important to keeping students connected and engaged, but this means nothing if the information they are engaging with leaves the realm of evidence-based reasoning. Therefore, the three works connect with one another to help enhance the argument about the importance of the Socratic Seminar and to allow both the learner and the instructor to see how these types of discussions can be beneficial in the classroom.

Author: West Virginia Raven K

Student. Traveler. Lover of Knowledge. View all posts by West Virginia Raven K