The Misuse of Asking Questions while Lecturing, or “What’s In My Pocket?”

Let me just start by saying I don’t think I am a bad lecturer. Still, reading a recent post by Petra Clafin on the dangers of misguided Q & A during lessons gave me flashbacks. Clafin focuses on math classes in secondary education, but the pattern pops up while teaching history on the college level as well. Below is a short hypothetical of what my wife, who is a math teacher, calls “What’s in My Pocket?”

Instructor: (After introducing the settlement of Jamestown) So what might have been the motivations of the settlers who first came to Virginia?

(Pause, length will vary wildly)

Student A: Land?

Instructor: Well, that becomes a major motivation later on, but this first group of English settlers is really looking for something else.

Student B: (Although there is a good chance it’s just brave Student A again) Slaves or tradable goods?

Instructor: (Deciding to focus on the second part) You’re right, but what kinds of tradable goods might be useful for the type of early modern economy we have been examining?

Student A: (Remembering the earlier part of the lecture about the problems of sea travel during the period and drawing a very reasonable inference based on that limited information) Salt?

I’ll skip the rest of the exchange that eventually leads to a fact that an instructor could have delivered in less than thirty seconds.

Of course, engaged learning takes time, but a class period is an incredibly valuable piece of real estate, and it’s fair to wonder if the result of finally getting to the answer “gold and silver” is worth it.  These small batches of meandering add up over a semester; I doubt I am the only one who has begun a term with aspirations of reaching the present day and ended up stuck somewhere around Vietnam.  Also, notice that when students answer these types of inquiries, their tone is often one of questioning, expressing not “I am learning how to think critically about historical issues,” but rather “hey, I’m just trying to be helpful by making a somewhat random guess.”

The What’s in My Pocket approach, or WIMP (couldn’t help myself), has a couple possible justifications.  It might be deployed to measure student knowledge. Assessing prior knowledge is critical, but it asking questions like this will at best give you a warped perspective of the whole class. Even if one student answers the question immediately (and ignoring the possible conflation of lucky guess with prior knowledge), does that tell you anything about the class as a whole? Using something like clickers and turning the question into multiple choice seems like it would do better job, because at least you would be evaluating 20-50 guesses instead of one.

I think the real reason we engage in WIMP is that we realize lecturing has some real downsides in regard to participation, while at the same time seeing it as useful to structuring content. This tension can spark some incredible creativity, or it can lead to a horrible hybrid of disorganized lecture and railroaded discussion. At one point during my summer class, one of the best students complained that she got lost when I asked questions during lecture, because the information became confused and vague. This was a student who thrived with open-ended questions and ambiguities in texts, so my ego couldn’t hide behind the excuse that she was trying to avoid thinking. Students can tell the difference between a discussion they are helping create, and an instructor only looking for a specific answer.

What are some ways to avoid the pitfalls of WIMP?  Claffin provides some possible solutions, but again she is mostly talking about math classes. Honestly, this is something I am still wrestling with, and only have a couple notions of where to start. One is to use Q and A not to introduce factual material, but to help students internalize material to which they have already been exposed.  The questions will probably be less detail orientated, and should be thought of in advance. This way you can think about what previous concepts are crucial enough to spend time reviewing and connecting to that day’s lecture.

A larger project is to structure a lecture around a short series of intentional questions. Rather then checking in every couple minutes with a basic inquiry, organize bites of the lecture toward the students being able to address a more open-ended question that you have created in advance.  Each lecture bite would vary in length, perhaps between 10 to 15 minutes. Providing the students the tools to answer that question would be the goal of, and the criteria by which to judge, that lecture bite. Taking up so much valuable real estate to better posit a question forces us to come up with questions worth spending time on. Initially presenting the question at the beginning of the lecture bite might help the students start to think about how to address the question as they are processing information. I hope in the coming year to organize my lessons in this way, and will report back how it goes. Please let me know if you think this has been an issue in your lessons as well, and ways you have solved it!

8 thoughts on “The Misuse of Asking Questions while Lecturing, or “What’s In My Pocket?”

  1. This is a great point. I’m definitely guilty of using the What’s in my pocket? type questions at times. One way to avoid this is to show students an image (painting, comic, etc.) on Powerpoint and ask them to “help” you understand it. What’s being depicted? Why? What assumptions are underlying the image? They are joining you in interpretation and close reading, not guessing at something you want them to say.

    • Thanks for the comment, and I think you are right that a complex visual source can raise questions that avert these kind of problems. I tried it a bit in my summer class, and I loved seeing how much students go into unpacking a political cartoon. I think I will try to organize some of these lecture chunks around a visual source and see how it works.

  2. Great discussion Glen. I have to say, I’m feeling a bit indicted here. I do this all the time! And you’re right, it is a lazy way of trying to generate participation, and often that participation does nothing but waste time.

    I do feel, however, that asking students to make predictions can be a very useful pedagogical exercise. It is an explicit manifestation of scaffolding, forcing students to build on prior knowledge in order to take the leap. Or, then again, perhaps it is just a good way to get the vocal students to blurt out unthoughtful, unhelpful dead ends…

    I think my jury is still out. I will probably continue throwing out frequent questions–sometimes even superficial participation can be the difference between students tuning out or staying with me–but you’ve inspired me to be a little more critical in evaluating what exactly this is accomplishing.

    • I am really interested in how to use prior knowledge as a scaffolding tool. Over the summer I tried an exercise where I had students write down five things they knew about World War 2 (prior to the lesson on the war). I borrowed from the rules of the game scattergories, and told the students that the goal was to have the most true things about the war that no one else had written down. We then discussed and compared the answers. the students actually got really into debating the distinctiveness of the answers, and it did give me a really good portrait of their prior knowledge, but it sucked up way too much time. I definitely want to learn methods of better incorporating prior knowledge into lessons.

  3. Good points here, Glen. I’ve found that questions tend to be most useful when

    A) they’re in the middle of a lecture, not the beginning. Students tend to zone out when someone lectures on-and-on in the same style for 50 minutes, and 75 minutes is entirely unbearable. (I was certainly guilty of daydreaming in lectures back in the day, so it’s hard for me to fault students now.) Stopping to pose a question works to change up the pace, if only for a moment, which functions as a bit of a “reset” in the lecture. I also tend to cold-call students more often than letting a question hang out there for voluntary response, which tends to make everyone pay attention, knowing that they might be the recipient of the next question. But this works best when

    B) the question is on a specific, less mundane point. I give out outlines of lecture before class, and the lecture on deregulation in the 1970s included the term “standing derailment” under the railroad section. When I got to that section, I paused and asked them what they thought the term might mean (it’s a term for when railroads standing at a station would lean and sometimes even fall over due to poorly-maintained track). I got several decent guesses that I never would have thought of, but I had to finally tell them what it was. I probably could have just told them outright, but see (A) above – changing up the pace of class for a few moments after I had just spent 25 minutes lecturing on economic theories of deregulation was pretty helpful in terms of regrouping and moving forward. Spending a couple minutes on a point also sends the signal that it’s important, and when I put a question about railroad deregulation on the final exam, pretty much everybody included the term in their answer.

  4. You are right that it is “lazy.” If argue that it is systemic laziness though. Most of us academics lack pedagogical training and simply don’t have a great set of skills to achieve productive discussions.

    It helps, I think, to throw out at least some of the expectations of what students should get out class. Asking what students found interesting and why can lead to really productive discussions. Just not the one you envisioned.

    Not that that is a practical strategy in a large survey class. But I think it could work with some modifications.

    • I think you are right that there is danger in having only using preset questions and not asking what students found interesting; it cuts an instructor off from good feedback and insight. Perhaps beginning a class spending a few minutes on what struck the students is a way to do this. You are also right that scale throws a big wrench into organizing this type of discussion, and I am very much interested in any tactics that might help.

  5. I love this discussion! I too find myself answers questions, trying to generate a “discussion” and getting either no responses, or incredibly vague ones. I’m always trying to find ways to get students participating, and I love your scattergories game! I teach only 100-level classes, and this might be perfect for that level. One thing I always do, when introducing a new chapter, is to start with a discussion question. I usually give the question out a week (or a class meeting) ahead so that students can think about that question when reviewing the material. Sometimes it works – and I use their responses to guide the discussion or lecture.

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