EOSC 220 Observation Reflection
On October 27th 2016, I had the pleasure of attending a second-year mineralogy (EOSC 220) class led by Dr. James Scoates and Dr. Matthijs Smit. The class has about 80 participants, and the entire 50-minute lection, hold only about 10 minutes, was a group activity. The students were required to solve a bunch of problems related to a type of mineral that they had not studied yet in class. They had to apply all of the techniques the learned in the framework of the other mineral systems in previous classes to something completely new. What a cool idea!
The class started out as a homework overview and some feedback from James, which segued into a motivating bridge in that was prefaced with, “So, what’s the point of all this? We are going to apply what you learned in class to the real world today.” James then told them their task and gave them an idea of how long it would take. As the students worked on their posters in groups of 4-5 (there were three different types of posters), the instructors walked around the room and made sure they got to each group before the class was over. The content they put on their posters was assessed by a popcorn like activity at the end of the class that was augmented by James (this only took 3 minutes). Then, James is planning on reviewing the posters and providing feedback to the students during their next lab.
Once the activity started, it was great to observe how the dynamic in the room changed. Everyone was discussing, working together, and trying to solve the same collective problems. James and Matthijs went around the room and supported the students, taking any opportunity they had to sit on the floor with them, chat with them, and generally break the student-instructor barrier whenever they could. Since there was a huge time constraint on such a large activity, James used a technique called ‘shortcutting,’ or basically getting students to commit to an answer to keep the activity rolling. I found this incredibly effective and broke down the culture that ‘wrong is bad,’ which led to a better learning experience for the students. At the end of the class, students lined up to talk to James with really interesting questions and discussion. They were really motivated!
One of James’ favourite parts of the activity is another motivating force, and governed how they designed the poster: you can start anywhere! This allows a lot of flexibility and for the students to choose where they start and means that the students that James or Matthijs visit later in the process aren’t left waiting for their help on the first question!
In a conversation with James after the activity, he filled me in on some of the things he did to modify the activity from last year, and also to modify it on the fly. For example, because everyone was working so enthusiastically together in class, James cut a worksheet (that was going to serve as a post-assessment) and went over the results with the whole class instead. As mentioned above, he popcorned the responses, so he at least had some indication of who was on the right track (in addition, of course, to the discussions he had with every group as he went around the room). This was the third time that they offered this activity, and it had evolved every time. For example, on the poster, James added some extra clues this year to help the students through the parts that some of them got stuck on last year. He also removed some of the additional data that led to the confusion.
During our conversation, James identified another deviation from previous years. They usually do a gallery walk to look at all the posters (while filling in the worksheets discussed above), but, due to time constraints, they have moved this part of the activity to the lab section of the course instead. I asked if he was going to put the answers up online, and he said he didn’t want to plan an entirely new activity for next year, so, unfortunately, he didn’t want to do that. I think that allowing the students access to each other’s posters after the activity will suffice nicely, but it’s too bad that there is always the threat of cheating, etc., that hinders such transfers of knowledge.
However, James put slides online before the activity that contained all of the necessary information. Interestingly, most students didn’t realise this and didn’t use the supporting information for the activity (which is actually probably better for their learning!). This way, the students have all of the content for studying purposes and the activity taking up class time doesn’t hinder the learning of those who prefer to do it passively.
While watching the activity, I noticed that there was a big difference in the relative abilities of the different students and that those with similar skill levels seemed to group themselves together. I asked James about this, and he said that he has never pre-assigned groups because it’s challenging to ensure that everyone will be there, and also it’s hard to motivate students in mixed groups. James suggests that it’s okay to have ‘good’ groups and ‘less good’ groups because in mixed groups you have the tendency for strong students to completely take over! This was really insightful, as part of my SoTL research project involves pre-assigning groups for jigsaws. Definitely food for thought!
This was a really great experience, and I will continue to keep checking out James’ classes, since they are doing such a wonderful job at implementing active learning in large classes!
Rhy