POGIL is an acronym which stands for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning.

We’re using this style of teaching in my Computer Architecture and Desig… One of my Software Development courses this semester (the name of the course is significantly long). I can see how this style of teaching can be beneficial to showing how teams get work done in the real world. Each person in the team has a role that they must fulfill. In almost all the groups there are four participants. Each person will have to fill one of four roles; Manager, Recorder, Reflector, and Presenter and be responsible for that role solely. While we are all working as a team to achieve a common goal, I do find it particularly difficult to not impede on my teammates roles and essentially “do their job” for them. I’m not saying that my teammates aren’t doing their jobs adequately. For example, it seems like a far easier task to correct a typo our Recorder has made in our write-ups, but instead I remind myself to tell my teammate “Hey you may have spelled this word wrong, could you go back and fix this please?” While this seems silly the practice makes some type of sense to me.

There’s a joke a friend told me once.

“How many Software devs does it take to fix a light bulb?”

“…”

“None, it’s a hardware problem.”

I must admit he got a hearty chuckle from me when he delivered the corny joke, but there is some truth to this. Each department in a company has a team of people who’s expertise is in a certain area. While they maybe able to fix something that may have gone wrong, their time is a precious resource that they could utilize to focus on other important tasks than to be bogged down by a task that is someone else’s job. While I did highlight a strong point of this type of strategy, I also want to note that I can see how this type of strategy can cause more time to elapse while getting a task completed, but in a sense it is the least complicated way of getting work done I suppose.

In certain settings there may only be one answer to getting a problem correct. But the pathways that lead towards that answer may be limitless. This is where the POGIL approach seems to put its emphasis on its effectiveness of getting students/participants to realize that “logical thinking and teamwork are prized above simply getting the ‘right’ answer”.

You can read more about POGIL here. https://pogil.org/about-pogil/what-is-pogil

From the blog CS@Worcester – You have reached the upper bound by cloudtech360 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.