The Active Class

Your lecture is scheduled for 50…75, perhaps 90 minutes. Maybe it’s a topic the students like, or you have a popular course, and they file into the room buzzing with anticipation. After 20 minutes or so, you feel the room’s energy starting to fade. Students are texting, reading the paper, checking Facebook, or just spacing out. Sooner or later, whether we like it or not, and regardless of class size, it happens. When it does, or possibly before we even get to that point, we often start thinking about “student engagement.”

“Engaging  students” can signify many things. It might be about presentation style; maybe you are as much a showman as a lecturer. It might be about the “hook,” as you find intriguing or controversial ways to introduce and discuss a topic. Or it might be about making the students interact, whether it’s with you, with the material, or with each other. No matter what path to engagement you prefer, it usually boils down to getting and keeping students’ attention.

Clickers are one way to increase engagement; this benefit has been widely reported, both anecdotally and empirically, especially in science and social-science courses. The large lectures standard in those fields are generally less common in the humanities, although we’re seeing larger class sizes and the transformation of some seminars into lectures in the face of budget crises. How might clickers help us engage students in the humanities, especially in larger courses?

One of the universal uses of clickers is to punctuate a lecture and vary its pacing. Stopping the lecture every 10-15 minutes for a clicker question or two serves several purposes. It can wake the students up just when they might be starting to fade away. They are then are forced to become more active in responding to (and presumably thinking about) a question. Even when clicker participation constitutes a small fraction of the total course grade, students will often pay more attention to the lecture when there are coveted points at stake. Even those students who usually resist engagement in class—those whom Graham et al. call “reluctant participators”—will participate.

Clicker questions can also be used to lessen the amount of actual lecturing that we do. The responses to a question can spur discussion; depending on the class size, you can either turn the lecture hall into a large discussion section, or you can allow the students time to talk things over in pairs or small groups. Peer instruction of this sort goes hand-in-hand with clicker systems. The interactivity can reinvigorate a class in just a few minutes.

In many humanities courses, we’re examining cultural or political issues from particular points of view. Another way to engage students is to use the clicker questions to set the scene or to create both relevance and interest. A colleague of mine, in an attempt to introduce the ideas of consumer culture and symbols, asked her class what kinds of things they did with their Barbie dolls when they were young. She used a handful of responses to create an impromptu clicker survey that showed most people engaging in similar activities. The students realized that “culture” was not just an abstract idea, but something they have a direct relationship with.

Another type of pre-question is the opinion poll. A controversial issue—of which there is no shortage in humanities classes—can be introduced with a question asking to what degree the students agree or disagree with a position. Once they have expressed an opinion, students often feel that they have a vested interest in the discussion, whether it is to defend their own ideas or to learn about others. As it becomes clear that the lecture content or assigned reading has a direct bearing on the issue at hand, this increased investment makes the material more real to them. These and other types of questions can help students connect with the topic at hand, giving them a stake in the discussion—and a reason to pay better attention.

Attention is the name of the game. It’s a no-brainer, but the more students pay attention, the more they’ll learn from a lecture. They will also enjoy the course more, which can create a positive energy-feedback loop for instructors. We know that it’s not easy to hold a student’s attention for an hour.  Breaking the lecture up and making the time investment more personal for students will make things a lot easier for both students and instructors.

For more information on clickers and engagement:

Bart, Mary. “Can Clickers Enhance Student Learning?” Faculty Focus. 18 Nov. 2009.

Bruff, Derek. “Engaging Students with Clickers.” Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. 1-38. Print.

Butchart, Sam, Toby Handfield, and John Bigelow. Peer Instruction in the Humanities. Strawberry Hills: The Carrick Inst for Learning and Teaching in Higher Ed, 2007. Print.

Draper, Steve W., and Margaret I. Brown. “Increasing Interactivity in Lectures Using an Electronic Voting System.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20: 81-94. Print.

Graham, Charles R., Tonya R. Tripp, Larry Seawright and George L. Joeckel III. “Empowering or Compelling Reluctant Participators Using Audience Response Systems.” Active Learning in Higher Education 8.3: 233-58. Print.

Patry, Marc. “Clickers in Large Classes: From Student Perceptions towards an Understanding of Best Practices.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3.2 (July 2009).

I am going to introduce myself by being a bit of a contrarian.

Don’t get me wrong. The first thing anyone should know about me is that I’m a huge fan of technology in general; just about everything from iPods to Martian colonization will get enthusiastic interest and support from me. And I’m the same way about a lot of classroom technologies, as you’ll see in the coming weeks and months.

But for right now, I’d like to be the voice of reason and measured skepticism. Specifically, I want to highlight the “why” of classroom technologies.

There are a lot of naysayers out there when it comes to utilizing technology in a classroom or lecture hall. If you’re a proponent of technology, you’ve probably run into at least a little resistance at some point. This might be, for example, an administrator that is hesitant to make an investment in hardware or software that doesn’t have a very long track record. It might be an entire IT department that refuses to open up yet another port to their firewall for someone’s online project. It could be fellow instructors and even students who might not “see the point” of doing something in a new way –  regardless of how starry-eyed we get when describing an exciting or useful technology.

In some ways, I can’t blame them. Who wants to be the university administrator who green-lighted a campus-wide adoption of Betamax or laser-disc systems? What student wants to purchase some gadget that they’re only going to use once? All too often, the speed of technology’s evolution outstrips our ability to keep up with it, leaving schools with loads of outdated, worthless machines and half-finished projects. No one wants to pick up the tab for that.

But even more importantly, we who are at the forefront of the tech wave—the early adopters, those who think outside the box—need to simply sit back and slow down. We love technology. We love its potential to revolutionize and reinvigorate the processes of teaching and learning. And rightly so. Back when the overhead projector was new, there were resisters who thought such a device had no place in a classroom. Today, we see it as an old but reliable technology that inspired us to adopt other kinds of projector systems eagerly.

We need to be careful. Our enthusiasm is a double-edged sword.  If some of us had our way, every classroom in America would have a Betamax VCR collecting dust somewhere. Well, you know what I mean. We can be pretty rash and adamant about being early adopters.  Sometimes we need to reexamine what we’re doing.

Most importantly, we need to remember that technology is not an end in itself.  I know many of us don’t need to be reminded of this, but it’s worth saying out loud every now and then.  As instructors, teaching is supposed to come first.  That means that new technologies should be evaluated with the teaching in mind, regardless of how cool they are.  Can they enhance our teaching? How so? Are there potential detriments to the classroom environment? How do these weigh against the benefits? What’s the learning curve, for both instructors and students? Is this a technology that’s going to be around for a while, or is it just a fad? Will the skills the students must learn to use it serve them well in the future or in other contexts? Will we have to adjust our teaching styles to accommodate it, and is that asking too much of overburdened instructors? We have a responsibility to ask ourselves these and other questions when something lights up our imaginations.

Of course, I’m not a naysayer.  I’m a virtual-worlds researcher with a focus on the juncture between literature and technology.  I believe in the enthusiasm of people like us, because that enthusiasm helps us both push technology forward and find innovative uses for existing technologies.  Technology keeps us fresh as we face a new group of students every term. Often enough, it does indeed provide new possibilities for our classrooms. But enthusiasm is not enough. We all need to consider whether a great technology is also right for our individual teaching situation. I don’t think we should stop what we’re doing or even cool our enthusiasm.  I simply believe that since our students and the world are depending on us to get things right, it behooves us to remember that classroom technology is about the classroom. Not the technology.