Vicarious experiences in learning

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In a recent iEarth teaching conversation, we talked about enthusiasm, and about what mechanisms might be at play if having an enthusiastic teacher really leads to better learning. Torgny then recommended the chapter by Hodgson (2005). She mentions “vicarious experience of relevance” in the context of what makes a good lecture. In addition to the vicarious experience of relevance, a lecture can feel relevant to the student for extrinsic reasons (for example because it will help them solve the homework they have been struggling with, or to meet some other external demands; probably leading to surface learning) or for intrinsic reasons (because they find it interesting in itself and meaningful to them pesonally and their own lives; likely leading to deep learning).

“Vicarious experience of relevance” are those where students experience something as interesting either because they surrender to the teachers’s obvious interest and accept something as interesting, or because they relate to personal accounts by the lecturer or to the images they are sharing, and start seeing the world through their eyes, take on the images, and perceive it therefore as interesting themselves. These kinds of experiences happened strongest for students who knew the lecturer best (for example because they were working in the lecturer’s group) and who had a positive relationship with them.

When there are only few vicarious experiences in a lecture, there are a lot of extrinsic experiences. But with more vicarious experiences, there are also more intrinsic ones. The study thus seems to indicate that perceived vicarious relevance can transform into perceived intrinsic relevance, creating intrinsic relevance where there had not been any. So being able to create vicarious experiences clearly has an effect on learning: by letting the students see the world through the lecturer’s eyes or by including examples or illustrations that draw the students in enough that they start seeing the importance of the topic in the real world.

I then came across a second article mentioning “vicarious experiences”, and that is the Morris & Usher (2011) article on how university teachers develop teaching self-efficacy: confidence in their teaching abilities. They look at the classical four main sources for self-efficacy, with mastery (feelings of success) and social persuasion (feedback from students or peers) being the most important. States like feeling stressed, tired, anxious or the general mood also have an influence on how capable teachers feel. And then vicarious experiences: observing others and using that to compare themselves against them, or to learn from their failures and successes, and avoiding methods that lead to the former and copying those that lead to the latter, thus growing more confident in their own abilities.

Obviously, these two short summaries of two articles working on completely different questions regarding vicarious experiences are just tiny glimpses into a huge body of literature, but for me, it’s a new and exciting perspective to think about how you can learn from experiencing something by taking on the experiences of someone else as if it was your own.

Hodgson, V. E. (2005) Lectures and the experience of relevance, in: F. Marton, D. Hounsell & N. Entwistle (Eds) The experience of learning: implications for teaching and studying in higher education (3rd [Internet] edn) (Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment) 159–171.

Morris, D. B., & Usher, E. L. (2011). Developing teaching self-efficacy in research institutions: A study of award-winning professors. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 36(3), 232-245.

Currently reading: “Leveraging Multiple Theories of Change to Promote Reform” (Kezar & Holcombe, 2019)

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I am attending a course on “leading educational change”, run by two Norwegian centres for excellence in education, iEarth and BioCEED. The course brings together people working on educational change in very different roles: teachers, administrators, deans, network coordinators, and it’s a great opportunity to connect with people and to do some really focussed thinking on how to change things we’ve always wanted to change! And to do some serious reading of really interesting articles. One of the assigned readings is the article “Leveraging Multiple Theories of Change to Promote Reform: An Examination of the AAU STEM Initiative” by Kezar & Holcombe (2019), which I’ll summarise in the following, because it is a really fascinating and new-to-me perspective on how project planning can be understood, and should be happening.

First of all, there is such a thing as a “theory of change”. A theory of change describes a specific perspective on how and why changes in complex systems happen, and it can be used both to understand current or past changes as well as plan future changes. There are many different theories of change that are commonly used, focussing on different mechanisms and contexts and looking at the change process from very different perspectives. Six main sets of theories of change are

  • scientific management: in a very rational, planned, controlled approach, resources are strategically assigned to grow certain activities to further an agenda, and thus change an organisation; e.g. strengthening a new initiative by assigning service credits
  • evolutionary: the “ecosystem” in question is seen as influenced by other systems in a changing world around it, which can lead to changes happening, for example, due to fear of missing out, or to protect the system from outside influences
  • cultural: traditions, shared visions and sagas are created and negotiated, and this changes interactions between people, leading to changes in the whole system
  • social cognition: the organism itself is able to learn based on arguments and evidence, and mindsets are changed in feedback loops
  • political: power and status/funding are distributed to elevate the groups doing the desired work, and buy-in of important stakeholders is considered
  • institutional theory: the administrative frameworks and norms inside and outside the organisation, e.g. accreditation, funding bodies, disciplinary organisations, shape boundary conditions and are thus the driver of change; there is competition and less successful institutions mimic more successful ones

In some cases, a specific theory of change is assumed to fully explain the change desired or observed in a system. But in most cases, it just sheds light on it from a very specific angle, and using more than one theory of change simultaneously would be helpful to more fully understand what is going on, or to make sure to pull all relevant levers. Kezar & Holocombe (2019) describe one such initiative, where several theories of change were leveraged to improve teaching across different departments. The theories of change that were discussed in the proposal for the project are more specifically defined than the six main sets of theories of change described in the article and summarised above:

  • systems theory: all parts of a system need to act together to create positive change. To improve teaching, not just the teachers need to get better, but they also need to be supported by the university, appropriate facilities must be available, teachers need to be incentivized to spend time on teaching, …
  • organisational learning: individuals learn and together change the way the system works, structures at the organization can influence how information flows and knowledge is put to use
  • network theory: considers how information and behaviour spread and coalitions form to minimise risk/maximise outcome for the individual, depending on how people get the chance to meet and connect
  • institutional theory: about how influence and status is used to change institutional norms, and prestige is aspired to

Using several theories of change simultaneously can support the design of specific activities or programmes (or retrospectively help understand what happened), and more generally there are synergies that can purposefully be leveraged.

Let’s take, for example, annual meetings (which we all know and love, but mostly do because that’s just what is done. Who knew there were so many different functions they could fulfill if designed correctly?). Looking at the project through an institutional theory lens, the annual meetings gave participants the opportunity to learn from, and meet with, the prestigious partner organisations. Inviting everybody into stimulating and significant venues, and bringing in highly-esteemed guest speakers leveraged the influence of prestigious personalities and institutions on participants. From an organisational learning perspective, the meetings led to sharing of information and experiences, which resulted in adaptation of those new practices in several new places. From a systems theory perspective, the meetings were organised to reinforce the framework that was being established, by using it as a guiding structure and always referring back to relevant documents. And lastly from a network theory perspective, the meetings provided opportunities for informal and formal meetings and bonding situations in both random and planned groups.

But also beyond specific activities, theories of change can be thought together in order to create synergies. For example network theory and organisational learning: Buildingof  knowledge and skills within organisations (organizational theory) can be supported by creating networks between organisations in which knowledge and experiences can be shared, or where learning can happen together (network theory). But there can also be conflicts between different approaches: For example if competition between organisations is fostered as a motivational tool in institutional theory where all is about status, this can hinder or prevent cooperation and learning from each other, which might be a goal from an organisational learning and/or network theory position. In the project described in the article, this did happen and was only discovered and understood after the fact.

I found this article really eye-opening in the sense of seeing the potential in considering multiple theories of change simultaneously rather than one at a time. Reading about concrete examples of where multiple theories of change act to create synergies and where they might negate each other really drove home the message that it is absolutely fundamental to have a good idea of which theories of change should be the basis of a planned change process (rather than just curating a collection of activities that all might make sure in and of themselves, but maybe not so much when taken together), and make sure that all activities are aligned with those theories, or at least not in conflict with any of them. This sounds like a really basic “duh!” kind of thought, but as someone who has always relied on communities of practice to explain everything I’m trying to do, I will definitely widen my approach, and highly recommend you read this article if you haven’t thought about these things yet!

Kezar, A., & Holcombe, E. (2019). Leveraging Multiple Theories of Change to Promote Reform: An Examination of the AAU STEM Initiative. Educational Policy. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904819843594

Learning together across courses — our iSSOTL presentation

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Last week, Kjersti Daae and I gave a virtual presentation at the iSSOTL conference, and here is a short summary.

We presented an ongoing teaching innovation project, funded by Olsen legat and conducted together with Jakob Skavang, Elin Darelius and Camille Li, that we started last year at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen: Bringing together third semester and fifth semester students to do tank experiments.

In our presentation, we touched on the literature inspiring the design of the teaching project, the study we have conducted, and then our results and conclusions.

Our main goal was to change the way students look at the world around them, by giving them a new perspective on things. A framework that describes this well are “transformative experiences” that I wrote about in more detail here.

Transformative experiences are awesome, because they trap you in a feedback loop: Once you have changed the way you look at the world and notice new things, this feels good and makes life more fun. Therefore you continue doing it voluntarily, noticing more cool things in a new way, feeling happier about it, and so on and so on.

One example of a transformative experience happening was described by Dario after we did some kitchen oceanography (more on that here).

But we don’t want people to go through the transformative experience alone, we want them to do it in a community of practice to support one another and create even more of a feedback. In our case, the community are our students at the Geophysical Institute, who share the interest in dynamics of the atmosphere and ocean and learn more about them by having shared experiences and discussions that they can refer back to.

The topic we wanted to address in our course and make the central topic of this community of practice is the influence of rotation on movement in the atmosphere and ocean. This is the central concept of geophysical fluid dynamics, but it is difficult to grasp because the scales in question are so large that they are difficult to directly observe, and the mathematical descriptions are difficult and unintuitive.

And here is where we invited the audience to become part of the very first steps in that teaching project.

We start out by making sure everybody has a good grasp of what happens in a non-rotating frame so we can later contrast the rotating case to something we know for sure people have seen before (we used to assume that people had a good grasp of what happens in non-rotating fluids, but this turns out to be very much not the case).

At this point in our demonstration, Kjersti showed a live demonstration! (And I was so fascinated that I forgot to take a screenshot)

Once we have established what pouring a denser fluid into a lighter fluid looks like in a non-rotating case, it is time to move on to a rotating case. Considering rotation when we talk about flows on the rotating Earth (in the atmosphere or ocean) needs to consider that the Earth has been spinning for a very long time. We can simulate that by rotating a bucket of water (which needs to rotate for a much shorter period of time because it is much smaller).

When we drip colour into a rotating bucket full of water, the way the colour distributes itself looks very different from what it looked like earlier in the non-rotating case. We now get columns of dye rather than the mushroom-like features.

These experiments are not difficult in themselves, but we wanted students to not just follow cookbook-style instructions, but to actively engage and discuss what they observe.

Therefore, we brought students in their third semester together with students in their fifth semester, who had done the same experiments in the previous year.

The idea was that the third semester students would receive guidance by the older students, and would be able to discuss hypotheses and make sense of their observations together. The presence of the fifth semester students would help them be less stressed about potentially making mistakes and help the labs run a lot smoother.

The fifth semester students had done the experiments in the previous year. We prepared them for their role (you don’t need to know all the answers! In fact, you are not supposed to even answer their questions. Help them figuring it out themselves by asking questions like “…”) and went through the experiments with them to refresh their memory and also talk about how they were understanding and seeing things differently now that they had another year of education under the belt compared to when they first saw the experiments.

And then for us: Distributing and sharing responsibility for learning is something we have been interested in for a while now (see blog post on co-creation here for more information). Having students so engaged in sense-making through discussions gave us a great opportunity to eaves-drop on their arguments and get a much better understanding of what they are thinking and which points we should address in more detail later.

In order to understand how this setup worked for the students, we collected several types of data: We had questionnaires aimed at the third semester students (testing specific learning outcomes, but also on their observations of roles and interactions, and interpretations of the situation) and fifth semester students (on observations of roles and interactions, and interpretations of the situation, and how they would compare the experience as “guide” to that the previous year). We instructors also took notes and reflected on our observations.

So what did we find?

The third semester students all perceived the presence of the older students as very positive and described the interactions the way we had hoped — that they weren’t being fed the answers, but asked questions that help them find answers themselves.

From the fifth semester students, we also got a very positive response. They especially focussed on how they had to think about what makes a good question or good instruction, and that that helped them reflect on their own learning. They also pointed out that the experience showed them how much they had learned during the last year, which they had not been aware of before.

They also really enjoyed the experience of being a teacher and interacting in that role.

Also looking at learning outcomes, we found that the third year students learned a lot more as compared to last year’s third year students (which is a bit of an unfair comparison since last year was dominated by covid-19 restrictions, but still that is the only data we have that we can compare to). Specifically, the misconception that “the centre of the tank is the (North) Pole” seems to have been eradicated this year (we’ll see if that holds over time).

One thing we noted and that students also pointed out as very helpful is that conversations did not just deal with the experiment itself, but that the younger students asked a lot of questions about other experiences that the older students had made already, like for example the upcoming student cruise. We had hoped that this would happen, and that these kind of conversations would continue beyond these lessons!

So this is where we ended our presentation and hoped to discuss a couple of questions with the audience. If you have any input, we would love to hear from you, too!

Reflections on the GeoLearning Forum 2021

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On October 21. and 22., I attended the fourth iEarth GeoLearning Forum (GLF). The GLF is an opportunity for geoscience teachers and students from all over Norway to meet up and learn from and with each other. This year, the GLF was organised in a hotel close to Oslo, and attended by more than 100 participants, more than 40 of those students.

Here are a couple of reflections on the GLF, in my favourite continue, start, stop format:

Continue for GLF 2022

There were so many amazing aspects of GLF 2021 that we should definitely continue with! Here is a selection.

Continue inviting inspiring keynote speakers

For me, the highlight of this year’s GLF was definitely the keynote by Ilan Dehli Villanger, who spoke about an approach to communication and cooperation with students by “meeting, seeing, hearing, respecting, and liking (loving)”. This might sound weird at first, but there were so many practical tips and tricks connected to the keynote that we can implement in future communications: Meeting students in a space where we sit at an angle, so that the meeting isn’t confrontational and both parties can look straight ahead into empty space without having to purposefully avoid eye contact. Seeing not just our first impression of students, but questioning our assumptions about what the features we notice might mean, and why we are noticing them in the first place. Hearing students by actively listening and paraphrasing what they say to make sure we understand. Respecting students. And lastly loving — or at least liking (and acknowledging that loving might be too strong a word for some, at least to start out with) — students: Looking for something likeable in everybody, and interacting with the most likeable version of them we can make ourselves see.

The idea of “meet, see, hear, respect, and love” was carried throughout the rest of the GLF and frequently referred to in conversations and other workshops — a sign of the impact it had on us! And it was a great way of kicking off the conference and setting the tone. I don’t know who could possibly follow up on that next year — those are quite some shoes to fill!

Continue mixing students and teachers, both as presenter teams and in small discussion groups

The other big highlight for me were conversations with students that I did not know beforehand, from all four iEarth universities in Oslo, Bergen, Tromsø and on Svalbard. These conversations happened in many of the workshops where teachers and students were paired in mixed groups, but also over meals and coffees, where many people made an effort to mix and talk to new people. We talked about what iEarth meant to them, how they perceived their studies, but also what iEarth means to me and what I do as part of my job. After a presentation that Kjersti Daae and myself gave on our tank experiments and a coffee break with kitchen oceanography, we also talked a lot about connecting disciplinary knowledge to everyday experiences, and how this can make studies more fun.

There were also some great student/teacher teams presenting together: Shout out to Mattias and Guro for a great team work on presenting and moderating!

Continue methods that include many diverse voices and that support transfer

I really liked how at GLF a lot of best practice was modelled: We had a “sharing session” with 3-5 minute lightening talks on different topics, a spontaneous open session where we collected topics participants would like to discuss, that were then assigned facilitators and we were just thrown into the conversations (yes, I continued talking about kitchen oceanography in coffee). At the end of the conference, we wrote a minute paper with our personal take-aways and sealed it in an envelope addressed to ourselves, and we’ll receive it mailed to us in a couple of weeks.

I also really liked the efforts to make the meeting inclusive and welcoming, e.g color-coding lanyards depending on whether people would be ok being photographed, and using microphones throughout to make sure everybody could hear.

Continue making room for fun!

This GLF, we got prizes for the coolest things: The best experiment (which was also the only experiment — but thank you anyway, Kjersti and I feel very honored :-)), and then lots of things that came out of the online form people used to sign up for the conference: The first person to sign up, the last person to sign up, the fastest sign-up, the slowest sign-up, … I had no idea all this data was being stored, but it was very nicely presented and great fun!

Start for GLF 2022

Anything we could start to make GLF 2022 even better than GLF 2021?

Start enquiring about what people want to talk about, and use that to plan the program

One conversation I had with other teachers and students about planning next year’s GLF was about whether we should have fewer sessions, so each would have just a little more time to go in a little more depth in discussions, or whether we should keep the sessions short-ish, in order to cover more different topics. My subjective take on that is that as much as I would love more in-depth discussions, we should keep the diversity — if there had only been four sessions in the whole GLF, I would have been much more likely to look at each session and think about whether each one of them would make the travel and time commitment worthwhile. Whereas now, there was such a broad program that I didn’t look through it in detail but decided to attend, trusting that there would be enough interesting pieces. So I think if we want many people to attend, we need to keep a diverse program with bits and pieces for everybody.

But I think this is a conversation that could be had in advance next time, and more generally also what the topics are that people are really interested in, both on conference level and on the level of individual workshops. Discussions on what topics would make it worthwhile to take two days out of our busy lives to attend GLF? And how can we make sure each workshop is relevant? In the workshop on “improving supervision of Master students”, for example, I was paired up with three Bachelor students. Since they had no direct experience of being a Master student, I could tell them about how I advise Master students (which might have been interesting to hear about, or not), but I felt that the topic wasn’t really the most relevant for either of us. How much better would it have been if the questions we discussed had actually been crowd-sourced in advance? Even if the questions had ended up the same, I feel like willingness to discuss them would have been higher if they had been introduced as something that either students or teachers (or possibly both) really cared about.

Start “quality control”

I’m specifically thinking of one workshop that I think was not well thought out and where the role distribution really pissed me off (think man doing all the talking, young woman being introduced as the assistant and clicking the slides forward), but in general I think it would really strengthen the GLF if there was some type of quality control implemented beforehand to make sure the workshops really serve as best practice examples. Maybe people who want to speak/present/run a workshop should write an abstract beforehand and from that pool, only some get picked? Maybe the workshop concept should be talked through with a student-teacher pair whose job it is to provide helpful feedback? Or two workshop lead teams could be paired up to provide peer-feedback? This would have the added benefit of creating connections between different sessions.

And the technology needs to be tested in advance, that was a recurring theme.

Start creating artefacts

Make contributing to GLF count — by publishing abstracts of presentations and workshops, by giving written acknowledgement on nice paper with the university seal to student contributions, by having the official role as “peer-reviewer for the improvement of workshops” that students can put on their CVs. Maybe we could also award prices for the most entertaining moderation of a workshop, the most well-designed slide, the most cited phrase (this time definitely “meet, see, hear, respect, and love”), the best interaction between workshop lead and participants?

Also I want to do a GLF bingo with all the typical things like innovation, students as partners, culture change, assessment :-D

Start making it easier to find people

For this year’s GLF, the plan was to take pictures of people as they arrived at the conference venue, and have them be projected to the big screen (together with their name, affiliation and an ice breaker like their nerd topic) during breaks to make it easier to find specific people one might want to talk to. This didn’t work out in the end, but maybe next time we could collect all this information right from the start through the form where people sign up for the GLF.

Start thinking about evaluation early on

Mattias and Guro did an evaluation this year, but if we want to improve the GLF longterm, we should set measurable goals and then try to measure whether we reached them. Maybe in terms of numbers of participants, or discussions with different people, or different discussion topics, or fit between interests and what actually happened, or … Maybe this was done this year, too, but if so I’m not aware of it.

Stop for GLF 2022

What should we stop for GLF 2022? The only thing that I can think of that I would stop is planning the meeting in a different week and across the country from other iEarth meetings, that many of the same people would attend. But the devil is in the details, and I’m not sure those kinds of things can be completely avoided, even if it would have saved us some travel…

Thank you Mattias, Thea, Kristian, and everybody else, for a truly inspiring conference!

The story of Robert and Susan (Biggs, 1999)

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I attended iEarth’s GeoLearning Forum today and yesterday, and had a lot of great conversations with amazing students from the four iEarth institutions: Universities of Bergen, Oslo, Tromsø, and UNIS. One student, Sverre, told me about having read articles on learning and teaching as part of a normal geoscience class (how awesome is that? Hat tip to Bjarte!), and one of those articles was “the story of Robert and Susan”. Or: “What the student does: teaching for enhanced learning” (Biggs, 1999).

That article describes two different types of students: Susan, who learns well from traditional university teaching, i.e. lectures and exercises, and Robert, who does not. Susan has a deep approach to learning: She comes to class prepared and with her own questions that help her integrate what she learned with what she already knows and what she wants to learn to reach her academic and career goals. Robert, on the other hand, is not as invested in the subject and attends university to obtain a degree that he needs for a job. He has a surface approach to learning: He collects individual bricks and delivers them at the exam. Susan does really well on the exam, Robert does not. Or at least, that is the situation when both are taught in a conventional way. But there are ways to get Robert to learn similarly well as Susan.

The first step is that their teachers need to understand that Susan and Robert’s performance are not inherent in their personalities, but that they as teachers can influence how well both learn. For that, there need to be clear learning objectives, and it needs to be clear how the learning objectives and the assessment correspond. Also, students need to want to learn: ““Motivation” is a product of good teaching, not its prerequisite.” Additionally, students need to have the opportunity to focus on the task without feeling the pressure to put all their focus on passing the test. And they need to be able to collaborate with their peers and teachers.

Teachers usually come to that understanding by undergoing two developmental steps.

Initially, many teachers believe that what Robert and Susan do is determined by who they are. Once teachers recognise this is not the case, they commonly believe that what Robert and Susan do mainly depends on how well the teacher taught (which often results in a focus on class management). But upon reflecting on that, teachers recognise that learning depends on what activities students actually do when they learn.

When teachers have reached that step, they employ what is called “backwards design” or “constuctive alignment”: First, they consider what the learning outcomes are; what students should be able to DO after instruction. Then, building on that, the teacher comes up with assessments that check whether or not, or to what extent, students are able to do it. And lastly, the teacher develops learning activities in which students learn and practice exactly what they will later do on the exam.

Constructive alignment of a course can happen independently of the methods used in that course, but there are methods that make it particularly easy to achieve constructive alignment: using problem-based learning or a learning portfolio.

In constructively aligned courses, Robert is learning in much the same ways as Susan already did in conventional teaching: He is integrating new knowledge with what he knew before, he asks questions that help him connect new ideas with old ones, he evaluates information, does all the higher-level thinking, because the tasks in class require them. This means that the gap between Robert and Susan gets smaller and smaller, and that we are teaching both equally well. And should that not always be our goal?

I really enjoyed re-discovering this article, thanks, Sverre!

John Biggs (1999) What the Student Does: teaching for enhanced learning, Higher Education Research & Development, 18:1, 57-75, DOI: 10.1080/0729436990180105

Using coffee in a talk on kitchen oceanography

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I have been a bit quiet on here recently, because I had so many exciting projects going on that I did not manage to document them in real time (well, not on here anyway, but partly on my Insta).

One of those projects is on #KitchenOceanography with coffee, where I have compiled a lot of interesting experiments into a postcard. And the postcards arrived yesterday! (Thanks, Vanja, for picking them up!)

My super cool new postcards in front of the first slide of my presentation, because I had to take a picture when they arrived and that was the only background available :-D

Juuust in time for the “Hammer talk” presentation that I was scheduled to give at the Geo department of the University of Oslo. Where — you guessed it — I invited people to play with coffee!

Lots of things happening in coffees everywhere!

And I was so excited to see how well people played, and how beautiful the stratifications turned out!

Diffusive layers formed by double-diffusive mixing in a milk-coffee mixture

Here is even an internal wave on the stratification!

Thanks for coming and for playing! :)

#Methods2Go: Methods for feedback and reflection in university teaching

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More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today:

Evaluating

Flashlight

I used to hate it when in in-person workshops everybody was asked to give a statement at the end, about what the most important thing was they learned, or how they liked something, or that kind of thing because on the pressure I felt in those situations. But virtually, fo example as a lightening storm in the chat, I rather like the method because it gives an equal voice to everybody instead of a few people dominating everything, and it’s also documented rather than just everybody just quickly saying something before then rushing off. It’s definitely a nice way to get a quick impression from everybody!

Doing this synchronously (as in everybody submitting what they wrote at the same time) also gives you an overview that is less biased as in there wasn’t some kind of group opinion forming as people started talking, that other people later did not want to go against. And sometimes there are weird group dynamics at play when people start off negatively and everybody just keeps piling on…

Letter to myself

Another method I quite like: asking students to write a letter to themselves where they reflect on what they learned. This can happen virtually as an email, and I’ve even used it in in-person workshops on paper, where people then put it in a sealed envelope and we sent it out to them a couple of weeks later. I really liked getting those letters from former me, especially when I had set goals or points to follow up on, and was reminded of them! The time delay there is quite useful (spaced repetition? ;-)) and also getting hand-written mail (even if written by myself) is always nice…

Five finger feedback

Five finger feedback can be done in in-person workshops, but also virtually (for example in a table with five columns where everybody notes down their comments).

1) The thumb. What went well? 2) The index finger. What could be improved? 3) The middle finger. What went wrong? Negative feedback. 4) The ring finger. What would we like to keep? 5) The pinkie finger. What did not get enough attention?

In in-person settings, this tends to take a looong time, and also put too much pressure on participants to make me feel comfortable, but I can see this working a lot better online!

Packing my bags

This is another fun method to look at what students want to remember from a lesson: Having a graphic of a suitcase or bag, and then adding sticky notes with the things students want to take away from the workshop. Works offline as well as online! But then it’s not really different from minute papers etc, so maybe use it to spice things up occasionally. Or, if you use it regularly, seeing the graphic of the luggage might already act as trigger for students so they start on the task, without you having to remind them. That might actually also work well!

Coming up with exam questions

Always a great method: Asking students to come up with good exam questions. They can then be discussed in small groups or with the large group, used as exercises practicing for the exam, or even used in the final exam!

But beware: Coming up with good exam questions is really difficult and students might need a lot of guidance, for example discussing a grading rubric and what kind of knowledge and skill should be able to be shown by completing an exam question. And I would always also ask them to provide the solution with the question, otherwise it is really difficult for students to get a good idea of how difficult or easy a question is (usually they become super difficult if students try to make them interesting).

That’s it for now about E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! There are plenty more where these came from, would you be interested in reading about more?

#Methods2Go: Transferring theoretical ideas into actionable knowledge in university teaching

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More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today:

Converting

Battle of theories

The idea in this method is that students asynchronously read up on certain theories and prepare to defend them against other theories. In a video call, a handful of students than “battle” while the rest takes on roles like referee or note-taker.

What I like about the method: That there are valid roles for the students who aren’t actively “batteling” so they are actively included in what’s going on. Even better if they can choose the roles they are taking on.

What i dislike about the method: I would personally HATE having to play one of the active roles in the battle, and would be super stressed out that for some reason I might be called to do it. And even the thought stresses me out so much that I wouldn’t use this with my students.

But on the subject of taking on roles:

Thinking hats

If students are asked to argue from specific points of views (e.g. advantages, disadvantages, costs, benefits, …), this can be supported by temporarily changing their names in the video call system. This might make it easier to act from a certain role’s point of view because it is very clear that it’s not a personal standpoint? I definitely like the idea of clarifying roles with help of screen names!

Marketplace / vernissage

Similarly to “gallery walks“, market places are something that I really like in virtual teaching. Student artefacts (be it posters, articles, memes, videos, …) are shared in a padlet or on some other platform, and students then asynchronously look at everybody else’s work and give feedback.

Depending on the group of students you are working with, and on whether they are used to the format, they might need some rules and/or guidance around how to do it, i.e. what kind of comments you are expecting and something like “everybody needs to leave at least 2 comments in such a way that every artefact receives at least 2 comments. You can leave more if you like”…

Minute paper

Oldie but goldie — students get one minute to write down any open questions and everything they want to remember. Combine it with a lightening storm in the chat or ask them to write it in some kind of shared document, and you’ll see what everybody wrote, have a documentation of it, and students can even compare notes & learn from each other!

That’s it for today! Next #TeachingTuesday we’ll be back with method ideas for evaluation!

Giving students choice on what is being discussed in class

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Speaking about co-creating learning and giving students choice in what they learn, one thing that I have found to work really well is to sometimes present different options.

For example, in my workshops on university teaching, there are some topics that are always requested, even if they are not part of the planned content for the course:

  • it is very common that participants want to talk about how to actively engage large classes
  • it is equally common that participants complain that they never know whether students actually understood something until the final exam, when it is too late
  • often participants wonder how much students know about a topic and whether they are starting from the right point for a given student group, or if students have certain misconceptions
  • sometimes participants don’t know how to get discussions in small student groups going

I always start my workshops by collecting the topics that are really important to participants, and usually one or several of these come up. Which is perfect, because then we can discuss exactly what participants asked for, while the answer to all these questions is basically the same (and would typically have come under a boring heading like “multiple choice questions” or “audience engagement”, which would not have sounded nearly as relevant to participants as me showing the exact same slide deck about the many uses of multiple choice questions and how to use them in combination with peer instruction in response to their question ;-))

Obviously this is a special case where I know who my audience is and what their big pain points are, so I know they will ask me for a topic that I was planning on talking about anyway. But you don’t have to be as open and ask the open question of what topics they want to talk about, you could also suggest my list above and have them vote (and then talk about the same thing again, just under the framing of the option they chose).

Or, if there are several different examples you could use to illustrate the same point, you could put them up for students to choose between them. For example, in case of my university teaching workshops, talking about feedback: you could put the focus on giving feedback to students, or receiving feedback from students. Many of the relevant points are the same: How to give/ask for good feedback, biases that might influence feedback, … But again, depending on what the current pain points are, the same content might feel a lot more relevant under a different framing!

Lastly, if it doesn’t matter which of several topics you discuss, you could also let students decide. Do you want to talk about good oral exams or how to form small student groups?

In my experience, giving students choice in any of these three ways makes them a lot more motivated and engaged than if I just present what I think is most important under my preferred framing. And in the end, with a little experience, it is not a lot more work to have a couple of slides ready that you might end up not showing, or preparing three different spins on the same topic. It definitely pays off!