Case 6: Teacher G
Teacher G is an engineering professor who uses clickers in the classroom. I sympathize with the challenge of gauging what students know and getting them to participate. The challenge of a large classroom is the inability to connect with students on a one on one basis. In post-secondary institutions, it often seems like we’re in a race against time to jam content into our students, but it just leaves us all exhausted.
In Teacher G’s case, he used clickers to get students to participate and then uses the response distribution to decide if a concept needed to be taken up or not. He appears to have leveraged peer-to-peer instruction during the clicker sessions.
Somethings that I wonder about in watching Teacher G’s lesson are:
- How are the clicker questions made? From one of the vignettes, I realized that he might be creating the questions himself based on student misconceptions he has seen in the past.
- How does he get students to buy in/participate? Teacher G mentioned that in student evaluations, there were students who really liked the clickers. He didn’t mention any data about students not liking them. To me, his class looked small, about 75-250 students. In the course I support, we have about 500 per lecture section and using the classroom response system (Mentimeter or Kahoot! depending on the activity), we might get anywhere from 80-350 unique participants; we can’t tell if students are actually paired up for activities. Do students have pre-lecture tasks? How does he approach readiness and feelings of learning?
- How are clicker activities structured within a lecture? The section with the student testimonial seemed to suggest that professors were using PowerPoint presentations and overheads, while Teacher G used clickers, possibly in addition to these methods. However, it’s unknown if the clicker activities are done before, after, during direct instruction or another form of instruction.
- How are clicker activities structured within the syllabus? Are these for marks?
- What support is available to instructors who are using clickers? From the way the students were dressed, this was probably in the 90’s-00’s and it seemed like clickers were something Teacher G was lone rangering.
- What types of support are available to students who are struggling with the content? It looked like only Teacher G and the students were in the room. Does Teacher G circulate during clicker time to speak to students? What happens to students who are struggling; are they identified?
What doesn’t shock me about this case study is that Teacher G’s class is very similar to what post-secondary classes today. Our post-secondary classrooms are designed to be theatres to listen to someone present. Even if the architecture of the room is put aside, what we’re really seeing is that there isn’t a lot of teacher to student support. In the large engineering course I support, we have an additional 4-8 members of the teaching team present who will circulate during activities. Not everyone is reached, but the support is present.
Case Study 1: Teacher M
It was hard to hear what was being said in this videos, but it looks like Teacher M et al are using project based learning and inquiry. Peer-to-peer instruction is also leveraged. The projects and inquiry work well in contextualizing the content within STEM. There was also really good leveraging of open access resources for students to develop auxiliary skills. The teachers also discussed outreach between high school and post-secondary education to benchmark. I laughed when they said this because when I was teaching high school, our administration would show us these extreme examples as evidence that we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing (e.g., to show that we shouldn’t do multiple choice: a physics test from a different school where the options are paragraphs, the correct answer would be found if students notice that “desert” is spelled as “dessert”. This was clearly an invalid assessment; students misattributing stress from writing exams from being in the room they are writing in = we cannot have exams in the cafeteria because it is scary, instead we should write in our classrooms where there aren’t enough tables and chairs). When teachers in university-prep courses said we were preparing our students for university, we were told that we weren’t supposed to do that.
Something that surprised me from this clip is that technology wasn’t necessarily applying to computer programs or apps. It was applying to specialized tools the discipline uses (e.g., probes).
Similarities and Differences Between the Case Studies
What I’m noticing between the case studies is how the station and project activities that are typically done in elementary grades start to disappear as students go to secondary and post-secondary. Tests are typically what get emphasized more and projects start re-appear in the end of post-secondary when the relevant skills have either stagnated or never developed.
The projects and inquiry being done in Teacher M’s high school are important. I wonder how the students were supported in the transition into this type of learning. Having to take responsibility for one’s own learning is often a cognitively dissonant experience. As well, it’s tricky for the teacher to shed the traditional teacher persona. I think the questions that arise from the inquiry and constant engagement in the new tasks can help bring out developing misconceptions. The teacher will need to check in frequently.
Another topic that comes to mind is the high school experience of group work. I know that some students might think that peer-to-peer instruction is bad because it involves “the blind leading the blind”, but the teacher is still present and can facilitate/correct learning. However, some students may be concerned about freeloading group members. The other challenge of these group work activities in Ontario, is that they are hard to assess. We can’t really tell where a specific student put in the work, and try to get them to submit their own individual components and the end team product is a very small percentage. I don’t think an individual mastery policy is possible, but this is what the engineering course I support does:
- Team Assignments, Attribution Table: Students submit an attribution table to show the allocation of work. After the TA awards a grade for the product, individual penalties are applied to students for undercontribution
- Individual Mastery Policy: We have individual and team based assignments. If a student is unable to earn at least 60% in their individual assignments, then they do not get any of their team assignment marks. So if a student has an average of 55% in their individual assignments and an average of 90% in their team assignments, their final course grade is 55%.
Overall, I’m having difficulties seeing how these strategies can be applied. Perhaps the part that surprises me the most is that the case studies discuss how students are using technology. Upon reflection, I realize that this was missing from my Unpacking Assumptions post. I think I need more time to mull over this.