Reply to comment

This morning's session with Ingrid Waldron seemed promising enough when she began with a "meta question": "What is the optimum combination of inquiry-based approaches to teaching and teacher-directed lecture/discussion?"  Her beginning lecture appeared very one-sided--we, the participants, listened as she pointed to a diagram of the circulatory system and and listed facts about the heart, veins, arteries, etc.  It was quite different from the type of inquiry-based discussion I have become accustomed to in the past week and a half, and I can't say that I enjoyed it.  To put it in Susan's words, we the orchestra was silent while the conductor gave instructions.  It would have been more beneficial to pause at different points in the lesson, discuss what was just said and ask for student opinions/questions.  

The turning point, at least for me, came when I attempted to answer one of her questions about the thickness of ventricle walls and answered incorectly.  Her response was to pick up on the part of my answer that was correct and try to rephrase the question so it incorporated this, then ask it in a different way.  I felt that this technique worked in our group setting because it did not induce any kind of embarrassment on my part, and the question was still left open for someone else's interpretation (in the end, Joyce triumped!).  Additionally, Dr. Waldron transferred more authority into the hands of her "students" by asking for participants to add to each other's answers.

The inquiry-based activity involving pulse-taking was, I thought, an excellent way to make what we had just learned something tangible.  Many people, especially younger students, are tactile learners.  Feeling each other's veins pulse with life brought us closer to truly understanding the idea of "circulation."  Afterwards as we were discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a lecture-based lesson versus something more hands-on, Dr. Waldron seemed a bit uncomfortable when she gave a short laugh and admitted she has been "loosey goosey" in letting us run the experiments on our own.  In my opinion, she had nothing to be uncomfortable about.  Our "loose" session was informative and fun, rich and appealing.  What had seemed so distant on the screen came to life (no pun intended) because we were allowed to take the material to whatever level we wished and apply it in a way that we could understand individually. 

Dr. Waldron's lamentation of the fact that students working on their own often learn "misinformation" from each other (and her description of this as a "quality control issue") saddened me a bit because the usefulness of this "misinformation" was not recognized.  As we have discussed before in the institute, the brain learns through discrepancies between what it expects and what it observes.  "Misinformation" allows students' different opinions to be expressed so that none of them feel inadequate or unheard; a review session after the activity would solve the problem of students walking away "misinformed."  And who is to judge which students' thoughts are of lesser "quality" than the others?