Aphra Sutherland

Science 511
January 29, 2019
Word Count: 1287
Critical Reflection 1
The first three instructional hours of my peer mentor practicum were exhausting. I’ve
taught before, in various contexts. But sometime over the past couple of years, I’ve entirely lost
my teaching stamina and voice (cue way more water breaks than I had anticipated). I learned a
lot about how to prepare. I made mistakes while explaining concepts to students and also second-
guessed explanations I’d made that were correct. And mostly I just answered a lot of questions.
However, the really satisfying part of the experience was being able to watch students try and
eventually, tentatively, succeed at the concepts that the TA and I were explaining. The process,
while tiring, also went by extremely quickly, which was due to the students having really a lot of
questions about the process of putting their lab notebooks together. I spent so much of the time
answering questions from students that, ultimately, I had no chance to ask any of the facilitation
questions I had developed for them as an active learning activity within the lab. The article,
Classroom Activities for Active Learning, refers to this issue in its section on Questioning
Techniques. Specifically, the article states that often classrooms trend towards situations where
students ask questions of the instructors, but the instructors rarely ask questions of the students.
This experience in my first lab revealed how easy it was to fall into this paradigm, despite having
good intentions of developing techniques for more active learning. Thinking back to my
experience with the peer mentors in the lab when I took the course, I do remember being more
appreciative of their presence as a second person (besides the TA) to whom I could ask questions
and less focussed on appreciating the discussion questions that they asked of us. I think that this
highlights something interesting about the familiar routines of education we’ve fallen into but
also suggests that it is something worth examining.
I became aware of the peer mentor program in the Winter of 2019. I had two courses that
semester that had peer mentors: Chemistry 201 and Zoology 401, the course I am currently peer
mentoring. My initial understanding of the program was that these were student volunteers
(perhaps because of the similarity of the name to the Peer Helper volunteer program) and that
they had chosen to come back and TA this course as an extracurricular. I don’t think that I
understood that there was a class associated with the process until much later in the semester. In
fact, it wasn’t until Dr. Summers requested that we contact her if we were interested in peer
mentoring Zoology 401, and she sent me all of the information, that I understood the depth of the
process and commitment. That being said, I still had very little idea of what to expect when I
came to the first classroom session, having not asked very many questions about this portion of
the class to the previous peer mentors.
Therefore, I had only a very general idea of the type of reading and workshopping we
would do in class and it has been interesting to dive into those parts more deeply. Of the readings
we have done so far, I found the most comfortable ground in Classroom Activities for Active
Learning, which seemed to be to have the most practical information regarding enhancing the
learning done in university classrooms, such as specific strategies on how to get students
discussing, answering questions, and directly engaging with material outside of knowledge
recall. However, my experience in this first lab has given me more to think about in terms of the
other readings, some of which I struggled to find as relevant, or frankly, useful. As I’ve
mentioned, the active learning techniques I had prepared (similar to recommended strategies in
Classroom Activities for Active Learning in that they make use of appropriate discussion
questions and small discussion groups) firstly, did not play out as intended, with the balance of
questions remaining firmly on the student’s side, and secondly, after reflection, do not stick out
as the most significant part of the peer helper’s role in my experience as a student. Given these
slightly contradictory results with the assumptions I had made about the active learning article, I
returned to some of the previous readings to gain a better understanding of the observed
inconsistencies.
One conclusion that I arrived at is that context is important, and it is therefore interesting
to think about active learning in a lab scenario. Since the learning in the lab is already quite
active (students are drawing, observing and handling specimens themselves in small groups),
maybe it is worth looking back at the general thesis of using balance in educational strategies
that is elucidated in The Nature of Learning (Dumont et al. 11). Inserting strategies of active
learning into the framework of The Nature of Learning provides, for me, a more focussed
method of applying learning strategies. For instance, while the facilitation questions are a great
strategy at certain times, at other times, to place learners at the centre (the first of the seven
principles of learning), will sometimes mean that more traditional forms of knowledge transfer
will be useful (Dumont et al. 6). Additionally, this echoes another major theme of The Nature of
Learning in that it takes into account how emotions function as a major indicator of learning.
The first Zoology 401 lab is overwhelming. I remember this from being a student in the course,
I’ve heard it from past peer mentors, and I saw it in action last week. Students who feel as
though they don’t understand the expectations and strategies are not optimized learners. At that
point, it may be more important to directly teach a skill and then allow them to apply it before
inserting extra active learning techniques, such as facilitation questions, on the understanding
that the lab itself inherently represents a degree of active learning. When students are more
comfortable with the skills, my approach can and should change, but remembering to provide
balance is an important reminder and this brings me back to my earlier reflection on what I was
most grateful for from last year’s peer mentors, which was the way they answered questions.
Their balance of question answering and active learning techniques obviously allowed me to
enjoy the labs in this course so much that I am here doing them all over again in this role.
I plan to take forward one major lesson from this reflection. Primarily, I need to be more
focussed on being flexible and to begin building skills on how to decide what strategies are
appropriate to apply at what moment. For instance, if a group next week asks me to show them
how to draw a scale bar before (a common question this week), instead of showing them, I think
a better strategy would be to ask them to show me how they’d draw it and ask them questions
about their process to help them find the answer. This will allow me to take on some more of the
learning principles described in The Nature of Learning, such as “stretching all students” and
“recognizing individual differences” by tailoring questions to their specific process (Dumont et
al. 7). I will be able to do this comfortably by understanding that the last lab was not a failure
because I didn’t manage to ask my facilitation questions, but rather a chance to build students up
by allowing them to understand the skills being assessed (another of the seven principles)
(Dumont et al. 7). Through fostering this type of awareness, I can emphasize the value in The
Nature of Learning’s conclusion: learning is best addressed through a balance of strategies.
 Works Cited

Classroom Activities for Active Learning. UNC Center for Faculty Excellence, November 2009,
https://cfe.unc.edu/files/2014/08/FYC2.pdf. Accessed 28 January 2020.

Groff, Jennifer. The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice. Edited by Hannah
Dumont et al., OECD Publications, 2010.