UnionBlend

Near the end of Jim Collins Good to Great and the Social Sectors talk at EduCause 09, Collins did something a little bit unusual. He asked each of us in the very large amphitheater to turn around and form small groups of 6, and then he gave the following task:

Imagine we’re all having dinner this evening, and you’ve got a chance to ask me a few questions about Good to Great in the Social Sector, what would you ask? After you talk to your group, you’ll have a chance to send one of your group members up to the microphone to ask your favorite questions.

This task was interesting for a few reasons:

• It effectively broke down a room of several hundred people into small working groups
• It gave participants a chance to respond to the groups’ questions (our group had a Jim Collins fan who was able to clear up a few points that we found confusing)
• It provided “prepared participation” – allowing participants to practice articulating their questions on each other before sharing them with the large group
• It created a “question filter” where groups of 6 chose their best/most relevant questions before sharing with the larger group

It made me wonder if a similar technique might work in large lecture class.

Would 10 minutes of small group question filtering make a difference? Would it help a class get key questions asked and answered? At a base level, would it dramatically increase the number of questions asked during a lecture? (I’m guessing it would!)

Would it increase retention and/or engagement? If groups came up with more questions than could be answered in the remaining class time, could they be saved/submitted in some way? Would a question voting mechanism be useful? Perhaps something like Google moderator?

I thought the technique worked pretty well for Collins. In a future post, I’ll try to run through a few of the dinner questions the audience had for him, and my notes on their answers.