The Active Class

How can a teacher use clickers to maximize student learning?  What are some of the “best practices” that lead to success?  While there is no magic bullet or recipe for making clickers work for you, there are a few things that will probably help maximize the impact of clickers in the classroom.  I recently wrote up a short tip-sheet, geared at K12 teachers.  You can download the PDF Tip-Sheet and share it with your colleagues, and the text of that handout is below.

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7 Clicker Tips for Teachers

Effective Use of Classroom Response Systems (“Clickers”)

“Clickers” are electronic devices that allow for real-time polling—often with multiple choice questions. They offer you and your students an instant display of the students’ responses. Use of clickers can help your students to learn key concepts, improve their enjoyment of class time, and let you (the teacher) better gauge what they are ready to learn.

But clickers are not a magic bullet!

The following factors hugely impact how clickers play out in your classroom: the way that you use clickers, the kinds of questions you pose, and the type of classroom structure you use. Listed below are some key strategies—based on research and experience—on how to make sure students get the most out of your use of clickers.

Go beyond quizzes.

While it’s tempting to use clickers as a quick fact-check of student learning, this is just one potential use. As you gain expertise, you’ll find that sprinkling clicker questions throughout class can:

-        Motivate and drive student learning

-        Develop students’ ability to communicate and explain their thinking

-        Help students become more aware of what is difficult for them

-        Help you adjust your teaching according to student feedback

Think of the wide range of questions you already ask your students on the fly (e.g., to get them to draw on their personal experience or get them to connect what they’re learning to the bigger picture). With some careful thought, most of your existing questions can be used with clickers.

Get your students talking.

Students learn more from clicker questions when they have a chance to discuss and debate the questions with one another, before casting their final vote and participating in a whole-class discussion. This method of teaching, called “peer instruction”, helps students to clarify their thinking, and allow students with a stronger grasp of the material to explain the material at a level more easily understood by their peers. Even if students do not arrive at the “right” answer, this discussion is valuable to students to help them to articulate and clarify their thinking. Of course, in order for peer instruction to be successful, the questions must be both challenging and interesting – if students aren’t curious about the answer to the question, or have no trouble answering it on their own, then why discuss it?

Use questions that challenge student thinking.

The limitations of understanding are revealed only when it is applied. Questions that are too simple, or just ask students to recall basic facts, are less useful than questions which challenge students’ ability to explain key ideas. Carefully chosen questions, including distracters based on common misconceptions, can call students’ attention to gaps in their understanding. Questions about which even well-prepared students can disagree, and generate discussion about the reasoning behind the answers (rather than “you know it or you don’t” questions), or even questions without a clear right answer, can yield a stronger understanding of the material.

Mix up your questions.

It’s important to use clickers frequently and to ask a wide variety of types of questions.  Simple questions give students a chance to feel successful; challenging questions push them to stretch their thinking (and help target the top-level of the class).  Consider a wide variety of question strategies to assess what students know about a topic, provoke thinking about something new, predict an outcome, stimulate discussion with a disputable question, or survey your students about their beliefs or experience.  Looking at existing question banks or working with colleagues is helpful as you learn to write questions.

The technology is not the pedagogy.

Nothing about this pedagogy requires the use of a clicker and low-tech options exist.  However, there are several benefits to the use of technology, including:  Anonymity, accountability, all students must commit to an answer, being able to hear from all students, accurate data on student responses that can be displayed to the class and archived for the future, and increased engagement and participation.  There is a definite benefit of students making an answer choice, in that they are more interested in the conversation in order to see how “their” answer holds up.  (We recom- mend giving little or no credit for correctness in order to encourage open discussion.)

Keep the mystery.

After students have voted, you hold a powerful tool in your hands; the results of the class voting.  Be savvy about when to show the histogram of student responses. Displaying these results often cuts short student thinking about the question (since they now feel they know the answer).  Use their curiosity to drive a rich whole-class discussion about the question, focusing on the reasoning behind the different answer choices. Then, once you are satisfied with student understanding of the question content, you can whip back the digital curtain to show how the class voted overall.

Start small.

Incorporating  clickers into your class is a process and does require some preparation.  Start with a few questions per class and gradually increase your use. Don’t be hard on yourself (or your students!) if things don’t work as you expect immediately.  Typically, teachers first concentrate on getting the technology working for them, then on creating good questions. Then they are able to work on more effectively facilitating the whole-class discussion and finally on using student responses to direct their teaching.  Experiment and discuss with other users. Talk to your students. Learn from them what they find helpful, and what they don’t like.  With time you can learn to flexibly integrate clickers into your teaching in a way that stimulates student learning and is an enjoyable part of class – for the students and for you.

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References:

While most formal studies have been done in the college setting, many of the best-practices in clicker use are drawn from the broad literature of what helps people learn, regardless of level.  Additionally, Penuel et al. have shown that K-12 teachers and college teachers approach clicker use in a similar manner.

1. The Peer Instruction Network can connect you to other new or experienced users: http://www.peerinstruction.net/

2. Literature on best-practices, videos, and question banks available at http://STEMclickers.colorado.edu

3. D. Duncan, “Tips for Successful ‘Clicker’ Use”, University of Colorado (2008).

4. Teacher Learning of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment Project (PI:  Ian Beatty), and associated publications:  http://ianbeatty.com/tefa

5. E. Mazur, Peer Instruction, a user’s manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall (1997).

6. W. Penuel et al., “Teaching with student response systems in elementary and secondary education settings:  A survey study,” Ed. Tech. Research Dev. (2006).

You can download the PDF Tip-Sheet and share it with your colleagues.

Clickers are a great way to get students thinking deeply about a topic, weighing the arguments and evidence for and against different multiple choice answers.  For example, here is a famous biology question that gets students to confront some deeply held misconceptions:

Many people — university instructors included — will often go for A) or B).  But trees get their substance from photosynthesis — taking in carbon from carbon-dioxide and converting it into mass.  So, the answer is C), and students will often put together a more correct understanding once they get a chance to talk to their neighbors about the question and think more deeply about the process.

But now, most clicker systems offer the ability for students to enter in their own answers, such as numbers and words — called alphanumeric entry – rather than responding to fixed multiple-choice answers.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of alphanumeric entry?

First, to fess up, I was always staunchly against alphanumeric entry clickers.  I had heard from the early beta testers at my university that such open-responses were a nightmare:  Ask students to input the answer to a calculation, and the instructor had to quickly scan over 200 entries to get a sense of the audience.  And to make matters worse, “2.0″ is read differently from “2″ or from “two”, making that visual scan nearly impossible.

But I’ve been changing my tune lately, as I’ve talked to instructors with a different view. Much of what I will write about today is taken from a presentation by Matt Evans, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin at Eu Claire.  In the abstract for his talk, Moving from Multiple Choice to Alphanumeric Clickers (American Association of Physics Teachers meeting in Ontario, CA in February) he opines:

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I say that unexamined clicker use is not worth using.

So, with that in mind, let’s examine the possible advantages and uses of alphanumeric entry.

Use #1:  Ranking

I love asking students to rank-order different choices.  But this is cumbersome at best with multiple-choice clickers, leading to horrible answer choices such as BA) 1>2>3, (B) 3>1>2, etc.  Matt gave a few examples of excellent ranking tasks:

Instead of asking:

The highest temperature is:    (A)  0 F   (B)  0 C    (C)  50 C  (D) 100 F   (E) 300K

Instead ask students:

Rank the temperatures from lowest to highest:    (A)  0 F   (B)  0 C    (C)  50 C  (D) 100 F   (E) 300K

This forces students to consider all answers, rather than only needing some limited information to get the right answer.  Matt suggests giving students a visual of the right answer at the end of discussion, since the correct ranking using just the letters (in this case, ABEDC) is hard to parse.

Another nice example that he gave was using graphical analysis:

Use #2:  Choose all that are appropriate / More than one right answer

Again, with multiple choice clickers, if you ask students to choose more than one item in a list, the answer choices become quite clunky. Here is an example from Matt’s talk:

And here is the “reformed” version:

One question I like to use in workshops is the following, but you could only do this with alphanumeric entry:

Use #3:  Avoid “priming” the right answer

Oftentimes, there is something tricky about a problem or a question, but if you show the correct answer in a list of choices, then students will recognize it as correct.  But this doesn’t mean that they could generate the answer on their own.  For example, Matt uses this question with his students:

What is the average velocity?

The answer in this case is velocity = displacement / time = -3 m/s.  Many students will recognize that the negative sign is important if they see it in a list, but may miss it if they have to generate the answer on their own (or on the final exam).

Which leads us to another use of alphanumeric entry:

Use #4:  Numerical Answers

I’d approach this particular use with caution.  We’ve found that when you ask students a numerical calculation question, then they turn to their calculators and work individually.  But the point of using clickers, especially if you’re using it with Peer Instruction, is to get students engaged and discussing the questions with their classmates.  But still, sometimes it can be useful to have students input their own answer rather than giving them a choice of answers.

One item that Matt didn’t cover that I think is another really useful application of alphanumeric entry:

Use #5:  Generate answers for multiple choice

One of the questions that instructors ask me a lot is, “where do you find the tempting distractors for multiple choice questions?”  While one good answer to that question is to pore through your old student exams and homework for common errors, an even easier way is to give students a question as an open-ended question, and then use common responses for next semester’s multiple-choice version of the question.

Drawbacks

Of course, there are drawbacks, as Matt admits:

1. Time. It takes longer to cover these in class, both for students to vote, and for the instructor to discuss the answers with the class.  So, you can’t do as many open-ended questions in a class as you can multiple choice.
2. Harder to grade or assess. This is especially true if you’re giving points for correctness, which is a common practice (but needs to be done sparingly, to not shut down student conversation).
3. Harder to get instant feedback from students. A corollary of the above, it’s tougher to scan student responses and get a quick idea of where the majority of the class is.
4. More complicated to enter. It’s logistically more challenging for students to input this data, but Matt says that his students don’t seem to mind it.

But overall, I admit, I’d like to try alphanumeric entry questions.  They offer a richer opportunity for discussion and student critical thinking, though they’re certainly no magic bullet.

On Thursday, the Transforming Education through Technology (THE) Journal is hosting a webinar (supported by i>clicker) on the effective use of clickers in K12 classrooms.

• When:  12:00 pm Pacific Time / 3pm Eastern Time
• Date:  Thursday, March 15th
• Registration:  Link here

Classroom response systems (“clickers”) offer a powerful way to increase student engagement by going beyond simple quizzes. They provide an opportunity for peer instruction as students discuss challenging conceptual questions with their classmates, giving teachers and students an opportunity to get real-time feedback on student understanding through these conversations and the histogram created by student voting.

Clickers enable more interaction between students and faculty in classroom learning situations. Instructors use this type of response system to present questions interspersed throughout a presentation, receiving immediate feedback about student skills and knowledge. Clickers may also be used for attendance, quizzes, labs, group activities, and more.

Join this webinar on March 15th to hear how the University of Colorado at Boulder utilized i>clicker remotes to:

• quickly and easily collect instant feedback
• encourage interactive classroom engagement to increase understanding
• differentiate instruction to address diverse needs

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Handouts and slides

For those of you joining the webinar, you may want to download the:

• Handouts (1.1 MB PDF)
• Slides (2.5 MB PDF)

Clickers are great ways to involve your class in what they’re learning.  I want to write about one type of clicker question that is particularly adept at enabling whole-class inquiry:  Clicker questions that engage students in an experiment or demonstration.  There are a few ways to do this, some which I find extraordinarily clever.

1.  Using clickers to predict the outcome of a demonstration.

This is pretty easy to do, and lots of research shows that students recall and understand demonstrations better if they’re first asked to consider what they think will happen.  This works particularly well with demonstrations that are intended to show “discrepant events” — something surprising or counter to intuition.   Many classroom teachers use a cycle called “predict-observe-explain” with such demonstrations, where students predict the outcome, observe the demonstration, and then work together to construct an explanation.    Clickers are especially well-suited to the “predict” portion of this cycle.

For example, here is a nice set of demos from Rhett Allain at Dot Physics many of which could be done using clickers.  One common demonstration is that of the Cartesian Diver, where an object that has some small air cavity in it is placed in a bottle.  When the bottle is squeezed, what will happen to the “diver”?  Will it go up, down, or not move?  That would be a great clicker question, especially if you embedded some reasoning into those answers.   Ie., “It goes up because XXX”, “It goes up because YYY,” “It goes down because ZZZ”, etc.

The answer?  It goes down, because, as Rhett explains, “When you squeeze the bottle, you increase the pressure in the liquid AND in the air in the diver. This makes the air bubble get smaller so that the diver displaces less water. The buoyancy force on the diver is equal to the weight of the water it displaces.”

Or, here’s an example from Eric Mazur, which could be easily tested using real equipment (left) and another one from Chemistry (origin unknown; right).

2.  Using clickers as an interactive lecture demonstration

A somewhat more structured way to use clickers with a demonstration is with interactive lecture demonstrations.  ILD’s are a more structured version of the predict-observe-explain cycle, and perhaps the only way that I really distinguish the two is that ILD’s are not always “surprising,” but often structured to help students see and apply particular concepts, usually in physics.  Below is an example.

Question via Shane Hutson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.

3.  Clicker questions based off simulations / clicker questions where students generate graphs or other predictions

But you can get creative with this type of question, too.  For one not all demonstrations need to be with real equipment.  Demonstration can be done with virtual equipment — the PhET Interactive Simulations are perfectly suited for this.

Second, you can have students generate their own answers, and then show the multiple choice version.

Here is an example from Kathy Perkins and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

First, they show students the Moving Man simulation, where a man will move in response to the input of initial position, velocity and acceleration.  Then, they have students generate their own graphs for a specific situation:

Then, they use common graphs to turn the students’ free-responses into a clicker question:



4.  Use clickers for real-time experiments on the students.

This works best in psychology classes, or some course where you want to demonstrate some fundamental aspect of human behavior.  One of the best ones that I’ve seen in this genre is listed below, which demonstrates our innate tendency to prefer immediate rewards.

5.  Use clickers to gather real-time data that students perform.

Sometimes having a few students performing a quick little experiment isn’t necessarily that compelling, but if you can aggregate data from the whole class then you have a powerful tool for demonstrating a principle or an outcome.  For example, if you want to demonstrate that flipping two coins results in a greater probability of getting a head and a tail than two heads or two tails, it’s pretty boring to have students sit there and do 50 coin flips to get a robust result.  But, if instead, you have each student do their own coin flip, and then click in with their results, you can get a real-time histogram that shows authentic data demonstrating that idea.

A fabulous article on using this technique with students to demonstrate the Monty Hall Problem (a nice statistics problem) was just published in The Physics Teacher. Students were able to perfectly replicate the theoretical prediction as a whole class, running the experiment in pairs.  It’s a free download, so check it out.

Simulation of a lser

Computer simulations are a fantastic tool in education — especially in science. They can show us the models that we have our heads, like how atoms pack themselves into a molecule, or let us travel to the moon to see how gravity works.  They can give us insight into the invisible, or let us see exactly what’s supposed to be happening if the world were really a frictionless vacuum.  Some great simulation tools are the PhET interactive simulations, or the Physlet applets. But we too often tend to show students the “right” model, the “right” way of doing the problem, or try to show them the “correct” way of thinking about it.  But, think about it, does a wine expert learn what the taste of “oak” is in a Cabernet only by tasting the very best examplar of “oak”?  No, he tastes a wide variety of wines, to learn to distinguish flavors of “oak” from flavors of fruit or smoke.  This idea of using “contrasting cases” to help students learn to discern and differentiate different features of a problem has been used in a variety of educational settings, from teachers’ understanding of educational psychology, to interactive lecture demonstrations. If you’re not familiar with this idea, or its twin “A Time for Telling”, take the time to at least skim the seminal article by Schwartz and Bransford in Cognition and Instruction:  A Time for Telling. This article changed the way that I think about teaching and lecture.

But, how does this relate to simulations?  Most simulations tend to do the best they can to depict and accurate vision of how the world really works.  And that’s fine, that’s what the design goal tends to be.   However, we also want to teach students to be critical consumers of information — yet they tend to blindly trust simulations.  So, I was very pleased to see a recent article in The Physics Teacher by Anne Cox et al, where they took the instructional idea of asking students to identify”What, if Anything, is Wrong?” and applied it to instructional simulations.  The “What, if Anything, is Wrong?” technique is a wonderfully simple and powerful tool from the TIPER project — check out their website for a variety of other little gems, such as ranking tasks, working backwards tasks, and predict and explain.

The authors of this study not only had students identify the error in the simulation, but provided the code for them to fix it; thus building in computational skill into the classroom practice as well.  For example, we know that students tend to do poorly on questions regarding the electric force on a charged object due to another charged object.   The authors created a simulation where students can add and move charges around, visualizing the force vectors on the object.  However, if they happen to change the charges so that the charges are not equal, they will find that they will no longer push on each other with equal and opposite force (as required by Newton’s Third Law).  So, not only must they identify this error, but also find out what in the simulation is causing it.

Regardless of whether your aim is for students to be able to do computational physics, the brilliance of this task is that students go in knowing that they’re looking for an error — and if that error is one that students often make themselves, then finding it is both challenging and illuminating, and MUCH more powerful than just telling students what is the proper way to think about that concept.  Now, it’s cemented for them.  The authors’ “What is Wrong?” package for electric fields is available on Open Source Physics.

For those who don’t happen to have the time or resources to create intentionally incorrect simulations, you can still use this same method with pencil-and-paper tasks, such as the TIPER “What, if Anything, is Wrong” tasks, or “Find the Flaw” problems.  Daniel Styer write about Find the Flaw problems in the same recent issue of The Physics Teacher.  He has a very nice method for giving these problems.  He presents the problem to the students, and tells them that four friends have worked the problem and produced four different answers.  He asks students to provide simple reasons showing that three of these candidate answers must be incorrect.  So, this is basically a multiple choice problem, with the focus on the incorrect answers, rather than the correct answer.  He provides some examples here. I can imagine using this method with clicker questions and peer instruction — ask the clicker question, but instead of telling students to “find the correct answer” by discussing with their peers, have them determine why the incorrect answers are wrong.  This gives students valuable practice in checking their own work — how do they know if their own answer is right or wrong? They should be able to check the values, units, dimensions (or whatever is important in your discipline).  And, says Styer, students like them:  find-the-flaw problems “appeal to their sense of adventure and of Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing.”  He finds that students are not a bit better at checking their own work, certainly better than when just asking students vaguely to “discuss your result.”  What a boring question.

And, of course, this can easily apply to watching films in class.  Finding the flaw in films is an old mainstay of science instruction — see, for example, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics or Bad Astronomy’s Bad Movies or some more geology focused Good and Bad Sci-fi movies.    Showing students clips from movies and asking them to identify the incorrect science is fun and valuable.

We have our classroom spies.  And they have sent us their report in a forum that will probably not be seen by the students that they were observing: In a study released last week in the American Journal of Physics, two authors report on over 300 recorded student conversations during clicker questions within 3 introductory astronomy classrooms.  And the results are fascinating.

When we write clicker questions, we typically choose some topic or concept that we think will be difficult for students.  We devise answer choices to capture common pitfalls we think that they’ll fall into.  We expect them to read the question, and discuss amongst themselves — using critical thinking, logic and reasoning to decide between the different choices, until settling on the best choice.

James and Willoughby, however, found that this happened less than half the time (38%).  The rest of the time, students were doing one of the following

• Falling into pitfalls that didn’t lead to productive conversation (38%) – such as deferring to a confident student, ending the conversation before fully discussing the answer choices, not talking about the reasoning behind answer choices, or just not having a productive conversation to begin with.  Note that this was more of a problem in classrooms where students were heavily graded on getting the correct answer!
• Giving some answer that didn’t really represent their thinking (26%) -- like using another student’s answer (even when the student doesn’t agree), guessing, or looking for clues in the way the question was phrased
• Bringing up ideas that weren’t included in the existing answer choices (12%) – like gaps in their fundamental science knowledge, or bringing in irrelevant ideas

This is big news, and gives us insight into what is really happening during peer instruction in a way that we could only have guessed at.  To me, what this highlights is the need for two things during the implementation of a clicker question — things that I’ve always advocated for, but now I have some hard data to back me up:

1. The instructor should circulate and listen to student conversation. By listening in, the instructor can get some sense of what students are discussing, ask Socratic questions to spur productive conversation, and see how the question might be revised to more accurately capture student thinking.  If the instructor is alone in a large lecture room and can’t cover the whole room, consider using graduate TA’s or undergraduate learning assistants to help circulate, facilitate and listen.
2. Facilitate a whole-class debriefing conversation at the end of the peer discussion, and discuss the reasoning behind the right answer (and why the wrong answers are wrong) — even if there appears to be consensus. If nothing else, this study highlights that students very very very often give the right answer for the wrong (or confused) reasoning.  Having a discussion about the question, listening to multiple student reasoning, and clearly indicating why the instructor favors the right answer and rejects the others, is critical.
3. Provide credit for incentive, but not high-stakes. At Colorado we use Mazur’s suggested method, where we give participation credit for clicking in, but extra credit (which counts against the exam scores) for getting the right answer.

James and Willoughby offer some additional suggestions:

1. Encourage students to share their ideas that do not match the question answers listed, during whole-class discussion or via written feedback at the end of class
2. Add “none of the above” as a common answer choice
3. Ask students to rate their degree of confidence in their answer
4. Ask series of questions, each focusing on one link in a logical chain, to more clearly highlight where students are having difficulties
5. More clearly guide student interactions during clicker questions (e.g., assess all answer choices, generate your own answer choices if necessary, make note of questions and confusions, ask for help from other students and instructors if you don’t know how to start your conversation).

“Fed-up professors say texting is the new doodling” is the national newspaper headline of a trend story that grew some serious legs online—passed prof-to-prof on Twitter and Facebook with amazing speed!

That’s because profs are also into sharing news in realtime via micro-messaging of course. And though we might not care to admit it, that means we’re often seen texting and tweeting during conference presentations and staff meetings, not unlike our students.

But students are texting and tweeting while WE’RE teaching! Therein lies the rub. Profs may be “fed-up” due to injured pride at our possible lack of interestingness, but we know that time-starved students’ attention is a casualty of the velocity of digital culture and deeply ingrained multitasking habits. At the same time, and just as likely, profs might be “fed-up” with all that Gen Y phone-tapping because we’re deeply concerned about student outcomes. Unfocused students fiddling with their phones in class can’t be good.

Or can it?

A study published last month in The Journal of Computer Assisted Learning showed tweeting students get higher grades. That research enjoyed enormous peer-to-peer promotion from edTech-minded faculty, students, and administrators (my Principal even tweeted it!). Turns out (to the surprise of how many?) that by live tweeting the lecture, actively engaged students are doing some serious thinking and learning.

To sum up the study’s implications: by encouraging students to livetweet the class, they practice valuable skills in distilling and reporting highlights and key points from the lecture or discussion. In the process, the classroom becomes both more transparent and increasingly connected to the culture at large, opening up possibilities for students’ friends, parents and other publics to actively participate or observe. This one simple mobile learning technology enables most key aspects of constructivist learning. And whereas texting may involve SMS fees, tweeting is free.

Livetweet P2P teaching

When classrooms are connected to the web through livetweeting, “students can become teachers,” to quote Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, speaking on a panel about technological innovations at schools at NBC’s Education Nation summit earlier this fall. With digital tools like phones and laptops, plus online access to the web (including Twitter) students “can teach their teachers; they can teach each other,” Hastings observed, basing the comment on his experience as an educational philanthropist and e-learning technology developer.

For teachers wanting to encourage this in their classes, step one is to figure out how live tweeting fits with learning objectives. For a journalism class at Carleton University in Ottawa, that wasn’t difficult—-the next generation of digital reporters knows that news doesn’t break, it tweets. In a recent lecture presentation where livetweeting was encouraged, one student remarked: “People in the class were all doing it; it really got everyone to actively participate. And even if they weren’t tweeting, we had the stream up on the screen for everyone to follow along.”

Once a prof settles on a course #hashtag and ensures it’s well publicized among students, it’s easy (and free) to aggregate the tweetstream using a live tool like TwitterFall. However, be on alert for hashtag hijacking—set up a moderator for sure. Tech-forward teaching is hands-on teaching.

Need more ideas for how to support student livetweeting? Check out this excellent presentation by Tiffany Gallicano, Assistant Professor of Media & PR at University of Oregon.

When using clickers to spark peer discussion to promote learning, sometimes it can be hard to demonstrate to students the importance of discussing the answer with their peers.  My colleague Steve Pollock just shared this wonderful question with me.

Here’s the question.  Think about it for a moment. Before you read the answers (below), submit your answer via the poll in the right-hand column of the blog.  Just give us a quick response.

Don’t look for the answer before you put your response into the poll!

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Steve used this question at the beginning of the semester to make the point that discussion does have a purpose in the class.

When students voted silently, 34% of them got it right.

He didn’t show them the distribution, just asked them to talk to their neighbors.  The next round of votes was 75% correct.

And the right answer?  A.  Did you get it right, or did your gut instinct lead you to the intuitive (but wrong) answer?  That’s what happened to me — I got it wrong on my first guess.  Peer discussion makes you stop and really reason through your answer!

So many great blog posts in the education realm this month, I wanted to highlight some of them on the blog.

The Innovative Educator: Want to be a great teacher?  Don’t go to PD. Peter Kent argues that we shouldn’t go to lots of workshops to learn how to use the latest tech gizmo — it’s going to be gone tomorrow.  Instead, create and rely on your own professional learning networks (PLN’s).  By reflecting on your own practice using three guiding questions, you can create and grow your own professional practice.

…and if you want to create a PLN but aren’t sure how, Free Tech for Teachers posted about Teacher Connecting — Find a Collaboration Partner

… and the Innovative Educator also wrote two posts about 5 ways to build your PLN and another about Innovative Ideas for Getting Teachers Excited about Building their PLN, using both social media tools and regular face-to-face contact.

Derek Bruff: Student Motivation and Class Participation — Lessons from Cognitive Surplus. Want to get your students engaged in some of the social media and web 2.0 tools out there?  Derek shows how he is applying the principles from Clay Shirky’s new book on people’s motivations to contribute to social enterprises — the desire to be autonomous, the desire to be competent, the desire for connectedness, and the desire to share — to his classroom this semester, through online discussions, social bookmarking, and a collaborative project.

Technology Tidbits posted about the Top 10 Sites for Creating Surveys/Polls. A helpful reference, with a little information about each service.

Free Tech for Teachers also gave a nice list of 47 Alternatives to Using YouTube in the Classroom. This is the most comprehensive educational video post I’ve seen!  Screening videos in-class can be a way to partition your lecture.

Derek Bruff: Clickers, Private Universes, and Agile Teaching. Derek argues that clickers (classroom response systems) allow you to get inside students “private universe” in a way that’s not generally possible in a large (more than 15 students) class. It’s hard to know what’s happening for so many students without something like a clicker to help you out.

Derek Bruff: Going Nonlinear in PowerPoint. Want to ask the right question for the audience, rather than a linear march through pre-determined clicker questions? Here, Derek shares some neat ideas for non-linear incorporation of clickers using a big powerpoint clicker deck, “choose your own adventure” clicker questions, and Prezi.

Tips, Tools and Technology for Educators: Top 5 Social Media in Education Myths. Think social media is all about entertainment?  Think again.  Read these common myths about social media in education, along with several handy links on how some K12 educators are using it in the classroom.

… In a similar vein, the Innovative Educator wrote about Don’t Silence Students. I was aghast to learn of a university who only allowed students to comment on a social media site through pre-approved drop-down comments, because otherwise students might use inappropriate comments.  The purpose of the teacher is to guide and support students in making meaning through appropriate conversation.  Hear from a teacher who allowed students to earn the right to their own individual blog.

Free Tech for Teachers: 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year. What a great post, with an outline of several really robust tools and how you might use them, from TodaysMeet (which I just discovered and think could be really cool), Twitter, creating podcasts, Wikis and blogs. Amazingly, he has also published a free 58-page guide on how to use these things, which I’ve embedded below.

// How to Do 11 Techy Things in the New School Year –

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).