Instructor role

How does an instructor interact with students during a collaborative inquiry activity?

The instructor: 

  • Outlines the goals/objectives of a student-centered classroom as well as strategies for becoming an active, effective participant;
  • Is accessible for interaction by circulating among the student;s
  • Asks questions about understanding;
  • Encourages students to take responsibility for what happens during the laboratory activities;
  • Maintains a sense of order in the lab without dictating what students are doing.; this is accomplished via dynamic interaction with them;. 
  • Helps students to focus on the negotiation of meaning and building conceptual understanding;
  • Guides students to think, rethink, and evaluate how evidence gathered supports the claims made;
  • Encourages students to work on problems with peers and together try to determine an answer—the group may conceive of and propose more than one correct strategy to solve a problem (having devised the solution to the problem themselves, they are more likely to be able to do so again when asked on a laboratory practical examination or on an in-class quiz or examination); the more critically students learn to evaluate problems and make meaning out of information generated in the laboratory, the more readily and successfully this skill transfers to work that they do in the "lecture" portion of the course.

Comparison of Less and More Helpful Instructor Laboratory Strategies. 

 

Less Helpful Approach:

More Helpful Approach:

Beginning questions, BQ

There are no BQs.

 

OR

 

The TA drafts one or more  (BQs) for the students.  There is little or no discussion about BQs.

 

Each pair of students discusses BQs from pre-lab.  Each pair writes one BQ on the chalkboard. 

There is a class discussion—BQs combined or modified. 

The entire class decides which BQs and parameters to investigate. 

Laboratory strategies

TA or laboratory manual outlines exactly what mass, volume, step-by-step process, etc. to use.

TA suggests a range of values.

Students choose their own values from the range.

Students create a chart on the chalk board to collect class data.

 

Calculations

TA demonstrates each calculation.

TA

a.  Suggests students talk in small groups about what they have found. 

b.  Asks students what information they are trying to determine and how they will go about finding it. 

c.  Tries to get all students to a point of understanding in order to discuss their results. 

Students:

 a.  Help peers to understand how to complete their work.

b.  Develop claims and support them with evidence.

 

End of Class Discussion

TA:

a.   Summarizes trends and results students have found.

b.  Explains the point of the laboratory exercise.

Students:

a.  Ponder the data, analyzing appropriate calculations, and talking with one another trying to make meaning of the data that has been collected and what implications the data has for their studies.

b.  Discuss trends and anomalies in data. 

c.  Construct concepts.

d.  Answer beginning questions.

e.  Make claims.

f.  Outline supporting evidence.

TA:

Provides guidance when and if necessary.