I don’t love silence. One of my biggest fears as a new teacher was that I would ask students to engage with a topic and have a discussion and there would be silence. Birds chirping. I know it’s good to have a little silence to let people think, but I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 20+ years of teaching trying to find ways to get students talking. Given this, my next few posts (interspersed with others by Kate and Mindy) are going to be about the various ways I have tried to structure class so that students will talk. In this post, I’ll focus on my use of Question Papers.
When I was in college, I took a seminar class on Spinoza that was probably my favorite undergraduate class. (Anyone who knew me at the time may remember that I pretty much talked non-stop about Spinoza all semester!) It was a small class – under 10 people – but it used a great method of guaranteeing student engagement. For each class, we had to write a short (1-2 page) paper that engaged with the assigned readings and then ended with a question. They were called “Question Papers.”
When I started teaching at UMW, I looked for an opportunity to try this out (you need to have a very small class) and finally tried it in one of my first-year seminar classes (what we call an FSEM). I had 3 students assigned to write a paper each day. Each paper briefly summarized the readings for the class, provided a reflection or connection about the readings, and then ended with a question. We would then discuss the question until it was time for the next paper. I required them to bring a hard copy of the paper. I first demonstrated this by writing (and reading aloud) the first one as a sample.
I did these Question Papers for a number of years, and they were fun and a great way to structure class. Once class got underway, it basically ran itself. Students would read a paper, and then we would discuss their question. When the discussion died down, we’d move to a new paper. Three papers seemed to work well for a 75 minute class. Also, when students would read their work aloud, they would often catch writing errors. I did notice, however, that when students were not assigned a paper for the day I could never be sure they had done the readings.
I moved away from question papers in this class when I taught it in 2021. A number of things motivated this decision. The pandemic seemed to change our students. They were more anxious, and the idea of reading a paper aloud was intimidating to them (never mind the fact that no one seemed to have access to a printer anymore). We were also still masking on our campus in 2021, and I didn’t want students have to read their whole papers masked. I also wanted to spend less time reading question papers in class and more time doing skill-building activities. This led me to move to a different technique involving “questions to consider” (which I’ll discuss in my next post).
I still remember the question papers really fondly. I’m not sure I will have the opportunity to try them again because I have really doubled down on skill building in my FSEM and that was the only class that really lent itself to open-ended discussion and was small enough to make it workable. However, I hope someone reading this blog gives them a try, and I would love to hear how they go.