Читать книгу Small Teaching - James M. Lang - Страница 17

Predictions can close a class as easily as they can open them, but in the case of closing predictions you are pointing students toward the material that they will be reading or studying for homework. Many textbooks include prediction-style questions at the beginning of a chapter; I suspect that few students read or think about those questions unless they are specifically required to do so. If you have spent a class period finishing up Chapter Five in your textbook, you might end class by asking students to answer one of the prediction questions at the beginning of Chapter Six. When they are sitting down to read Chapter Six that evening or the next day, and spot that question again, they will recall the predictions they made in class, which should (re)-activate their prior knowledge.

You can push this activity one step further by asking students to revisit a closing prediction question in the opening minutes of the next class and reflect on whether or not they got it right and why they did (or didn't). To continue with the example from the previous section, let's assume I had presented the three experiments on prediction and learning in my class period on Monday. But I had reserved a fourth case, one that introduces a new wrinkle to the research, for the end of class. In the closing minutes of the period I describe the setup of this last experiment and ask them to predict the results. But this time I send them away without revealing what happened, and leave them with a teaser: “You'll find the results of this experiment in your reading for Wednesday's class.” When students return on Wednesday, I can ask a few students to remind me what they had predicted on Monday, to describe the results they read about, and to account for the difference: What principle or new idea explains the discrepancy between the first three experiments and the fourth one?