Using student representatives to improve communication with your class

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Maybe it’s a German thing, but we have had student representatives starting as early as in primary school: two students per class, a boy and a girl, that get selected by the class and that have the mandate to speak for the whole group whenever the teacher wants easy access to what the class thinks about certain topics, but doesn’t want to open up a discussion with everyone, or when there are issues the class wants to bring to the teacher’s attention without making it obvious who raised the issues.

I remember that at least one year, we talked about what that role contained: How you needed to be approachable to all kids in the class, not just a small clique, and how you needed to keep things told to you in confidence to yourself. And how the teacher wouldn’t project complaints on the messenger, but would also know that they were just conveying a message that they might or might not agree with.

This obviously also works at university level: Sometimes it’s good if students don’t have to approach the teacher themselves about something that is bothering them. And sometimes it is easier to check in with one or two students to get a quick feedback than trying to get individual feedback from every student, or discussing with the whole class.

However, for me having student representatives is really one step on the way from not talking to students to talking to as many students as possible, which would be the ideal case. Not necessarily because you might not get all the information by not talking to everybody (which you might not), but because I think it matters to students to be asked and heard, more so through a conversation or even anonymous feedback forms than through student representatives. Unless you make it very clear that you want to get everybody’s feedback on an issue, but that you are asking the student representatives to collect and compile it for you, in which case it would probably be a good idea to provide a little time for those discussions to show how serious you are about making sure everybody is represented and heard, not just the student representative and their best friends.

What do you think? What are your experiences with student representatives?

Our presentation at #FieldWorkFix: “An interactive mobile adventure on coastal protection”

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This summer I had a fun little side project: I was co-supervising a Bachelor thesis in geography at Kiel University! Janina Dreeßen, with Katja Kuhwald as her main supervisor, did an excellent job, and I am presenting her work at the #FieldWorkFix conference today. If you can’t join later, here are my slides and what I’m planning to say. Enjoy!

Janina’s task was to create a learning opportunity on coastal protection for 16-year olds in a school setting, to run it with some students from her target group, and to do a preliminary evaluation of how it worked. And that’s what I want to present here (of course she also did a review of both the subject of coastal protection, and the literature on how students learn with digital media and on excursions, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation).

The learning outcomes that Janina focussed on were

  • to be able to name which coastal protection measures exist close to the students’ homes (i.e. on a specific part of the German Baltic Sea coast),
  • to recognising those coastal protection measures “in the wild” and understand their functioning, and
  • to explain why there are rules in place to protect dunes etc, and what the rules are.

Because of Covid-19 regulations in Germany this spring, we wanted to create something that could be done outside, and socially distant.

We decided to create a virtual scavenger hunt using the app Actionbound that provides the platform and an easy drag-and-drop interface to create interactive mobile adventures. Actionbound serves as a virtual guide to different locations, which you can navigate to following an arrow or looking at a map, and you can prescribe whether the mobile phone’s GPS actually has to show that a location has been reached (within a couple of meters) for the scavenger hunt to continue, or whether you trust your players to find it, or you can also allow to skip it.

Within the app, you can provide media related to, and released at, specific locations: Movies, sounds, pictures, texts; so there is a great potential to use this in teaching. Actionbound scavenger hunts are also interactive experiences, as it is possible to create quizzes using multiple-choice questions, ask for free text answers, or media uploads. All of these can be made compulsory (so you can’t continue the scavenger hunt unless you respond) or voluntary, so they can be skipped.

Actionbound runs on the participants’ own smartphones, and scavenger hunts can be downloaded in advance and played offline, if data usage is restricted or the network in the region might be a problem.

The person who creates a scavenger hunt is provided with usage statistics: How many people played, how long they played, what they answered, the files they uploaded, those kinds of things.

Playing a scavenger hunt using Actionbound is free for players. Creating scavenger hunts is free for private use (so great if you want to just test it!), but for educational or commercial use, you have to buy licenses. We were lucky as we could get a free educational license under the umbrella of GEO-Tag der Natur, which bought licenses and distributed them for free to people creating scavenger hunts to be played on the topic and within the timeframe of that larger project (no coincidence here, that’s my project and Janina’s idea was a perfect match for what we were looking for :-)).

The design of our scavenger hunt was guided by our interpretation of the self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan (e.g. 2000, but many more). This theory suggests that learning is optimal when it is intrinsically motivated, and that in order to feel intrinsic motivation, three basic needs have to be met: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy means that we need to feel that we have control over our behaviour, that we have choices that we can make in whatever way we please. Obviously in a school setting, there is always going to be external constraints, but the more we can give students ownership over what is going on, the more likely they are to feel motivated.

For our scavenger hunt this means that, where possible, we provide different options for how tasks can be done (and I will give an example of that later).

We do want everybody to reach specific waypoints and look at different things along the way, but we give participants flexibility for how exactly they reach those waypoints (there is an obvious way, but they can also do detours on the way if they like), and how they organise their time. We do that for example by letting them know when they have reached the mid-way point and what type of larger tasks are still ahead of them, so they can estimate how much time they will need to get back to the starting point, and decide when and where they would like to take their breaks.

Below, you see a map of the area we were focussing on: We start out in location (1), then students head to stations 2 to 11, and then everybody meets up at station (12) in the end, to drive back to school together. On this tour, students see many features that are relevant to coastal protection, some of which you can probably spot from this satellite picture: We see for example the marina, the slip hook which contains a nature reserve, sand banks offshore off the coastline, a dyke, and groynes.

We do want to know whether students recognise relevant features along this tour that they’ve been introduced to earlier, so one task was for example to take and upload a picture of the “spit hook” — a term that they were likely not familiar with before and where they had to make the transfer from the map above to the feature you see in the pictures below. It was visible on all pictures students submitted, although better on some than on others.

Back to basic needs that need to be fulfilled in order to feel intrinsic motivation! The second basic need, the feeling of connection, we try to address by letting students work in small groups of 2 to 4. Within those groups, we foster a sense of belonging by starting the scavenger hunt off by asking them about their personal experience with extreme(-ish) events.

This, for example, shows a relatively common (as in about once a year) event in Kiel, the next bigger city to where this scavenger hunt is located, that students doing this tour are likely familiar with: Storm surges in the Baltic Sea often lead to roads close to the water being closed and flooded, and waves breaking over the sea walls. Damages to sea walls can regularly be seen (also because it takes years before they are being repaired), and booms to close roads off with with “road closed due to flooding”-signs are permanently installed, so students should have some personal experiences and prior knowledge that can be activated. Talking about personal experiences and sharing stories about them is a good way bond with others.

The third basic need that must be fulfilled is a feeling of mastery, which we tried to ensure both by scaffolding our tasks and by making sure that students could make choices that would allow them to show their strengths.

For example, the last task of our scavenger hunt was to create a movie about a coastal protection measure of their choice, in whatever format they chose. They were given this task at the farthest point out, so they could walk back past all the coastal protection measures they had seen on their way out, contemplating the task, and then use free time towards the end to implement it.

I expected students would submit something that looks like what we show here (although that’s my incredibly adorable and smart three year old niece and not a 16 year old student): building structures on the sandy beach, maybe discussing the design criteria behind them, and then maybe making a large wave to show how it breaks (or doesn’t break) the structure.

Here is one example of a movie that was uploaded (and other examples include someone sitting on a bench, talking about coastal protection in a story-telling sort of way), that was clearly thoroughly thought-through and produced: The movie shows a person walking down a dyke towards the sea. As she is walking, a narrator talks about how dykes protect settlements from storm surges. The camera follows the person walking down the dyke as she crosses a street and starts stepping on the dunes, where the narrator (who is now also visible on camera) steps in and tells her to stop, and explains how there are rules in place to protect the dunes. He then also points out other coastal protection measures that are visible in the distance.

So now we are coming to our conclusions. Throughout this process, and testing this scavenger hunt on a 10th grade geography class, what did we learn?

Generally, things worked really well. Being able to deliver inputs at specific locations without students following a guide around gave them a feeling of autonomy which they seemed to enjoy, and we were positively surprised by the quality of most of the artefacts we collected via the app. Despite (or maybe even because of) it’s game-like appearance, Actionbound turned out to be well suited for use in a school context, although the effort of creating a scavenge hunt is not inconsiderable. In our case, we created a scavenger hunt that can be played by many different school classes over months or even years, and the effort needed to set something like this up might be more realistic than if it is just done for use with one single class.

Using self-determination theory to guide development was also useful for us, because it reminded us to include elements beyond the classical tasks of “read this, then answer the question to show us that you understood what you read”. Including elements of gamification made it fun and memorable, but did hopefully not distract from learning.

But another thing we learned (which we had also been advised before, but I guess this is something everybody needs to learn for themselves): test, test, and test again! It is frustrating if, for example, “dog” is the expected and accepted answer to the question of who is not allowed in the dunes, and “dogs” then isn’t counted as correct, or even looses you points. Those kind of things we only caught when testing with the school class, but would ideally have caught earlier.

And then we were very lucky with the weather — this might not have been fun if it hadn’t been warm and sunny, and we did not have a backup plan!

One thing I would try and implement more next time is to have students really do something at the location they are at — not just observe, but actually either collect something that they bring home to analyse later, or have them work on an artefact that stays in this location and that other groups can build on (giant sandcastle? wall painting? …?). Because now for us it was great that students could see the coastal protection measures “in the wild”, to scale, interacting with the ocean (albeit on a calm day), but I would like to strengthen that connection with the actual physical location even further in the future.

One last thought: I would really like to do a similar thing as co-creation in the future, where students design scavenger hunts to teach other students about a topic they first did some research on themselves. That would a) be a great way to document their own learning (instead of e.g. writing a report), and b) likely lead to scavenger hunts that are even better tailored to that specific target group, and even more fun to do. Actionbound has that option already implemented, and I think that could be great!

But that’s for another time.

Thanks, Janina and Katja, for this fun project! :)

#Methods2Go: Methods to secure results in university teaching

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More method ideas from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions!

Today: methods to secure results.

Learning walk

I’ve been using plenty of virtual “gallery walkes” recently, where students have worked on a joint google slides document (either each on their own slide, or each group on their own slide) and we then go through those slides together. There are several ways to do this walk — either students go through the slide deck on their own or with their groups, potentially discussing things and leaving comments, or we go through all the slides together and talk about them with the large group. But obviously, something similar works really well in in-person meetings, too (and that’s where the method originally came from).

In a “learning walk” (or gallery walk), visualized key results are put up throughout a room and students walk from one to the next to recapitulate the ideas. They could be guided by a specific question (probably a good idea) or just use this as an opportunity to recap everything they learned so far.

I can imagine this really well at the end of a semester, with key graphics on display (possibly without captions) and the task to make sure that everybody can explain all of the graphics. I would then encourage students to talk to each other, or even to leave notes with key points, thus co-creating the explanations for the key graphics. I might start out with having small groups work on a first draft for each of the graphics, and then open that up for peer feedback + additional points being added throughout the duration of the learning walk.

Learning diary

In a learning diary, students document their learning process. This can happen as part of an assessment, or formative feedback, or without ever showing it to a teacher. What I like about learning diaries is the more or less continuous documentation of the learning process, and I think it’s a helpful and motivating routine to take on, and also great to make sure notes stay in one place and easily accessible.

I have used what I thought of as “lab books” (but which is basically a learning diary) for many years now, and that’s exactly how I use them: To have all my notes in one place. On talks I’ve attended, workshops I’ve joined, articles I have read, goals I have set, tasks I have worked on (sometimes I set the first double page up as a Kanban board with the columns “waiting”, “to do”, “doing”, “done”, and post small sticky notes to the respective places, and then once a month I put all the “done” notes on a page for that month, thus creating an archive of what I achieved that month. Super satisfying, because usually this stuff does not become tangible that way!).

I’m using actual paper books for this (and I don’t see that changing anytime soon — commitments made on paper make me feel a lot more committed to them than if I just type something, and also I remember my notes by where something was on a page, what pen I used, and other similar pointers), but I am sure there are plenty of virtual methods that might work just as well or even better for others.

Structural mapping technique

A teacher provides flashcards or sticky notes with key terms, students use them to map out connections on a large piece of paper. It’s as easy as it sounds, but great for students to discuss relations between terms, maybe adding others that they need to bridge “long distances” or that they think are important to include.

I like the idea of students representing structures of concepts not just by describing them with words, but by how they sort them in space. It makes discussions a lot easier because miscommunication becomes more obvious when there are physical representation of a shared (or not) understanding.

Glossary

Throughout the semester, difficult and/or technical terms are collected and explanations for those terms are written in a shared document, either by individual students taking turns, by small groups, or by the whole class. Those terms and corresponding explanations are collected and distributed to everybody to use as glossary in preparation for the exam, or just for future reference. Love this as a co-created product of shared understanding!

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to end a lesson with”.

What other methods do you like to secure results at the end of a lesson?

#Methods2Go: methods to facilitate knowledge application in university teaching

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Another method idea from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions!

Today: a method to apply knowledge.

Application cards

I really like the idea behind “application cards”: the teacher writes a theory, technical term or other important keyword on one side of flashcards, students then come up with an application, a concrete example or somewhere where they would encounter this in their everyday lives, and write it on the other side.

This very basic idea of matching some theoretical construct with its concrete, experience-able manifestation is so useful and something we forget too often!

My favourite example: Hydraulic jumps! Sound horriby theoretical until you start discovering them everywhere: In rivers, you sink when doing the dishes, when washing the car…

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to secure results”.

What other methods do you like to fascilitate application of knowledge?

Molecular diffusion at different temperatures (involving tea bags and some convection)

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I thought I had posted the picture below some time in winter already, but when I recently searched for it, I couldn’t find it. So either I didn’t post it, or I didn’t post any sensible search terms with it, in any case: It’s useless. So here we go again.

Below you see two tea bags that were placed into cold (left) and hot (right) water at the same time. On the left, the tea is sinking down in streaks, while at the same time on the right everything  is completely mixed through and through, showing how molecular diffusion depends on the temperature. Which is why we usually make hot tea.

Funnily enough, as I was about to write this blog post and had the picture already open on my laptop, I felt thirsty and decided to prepare a cold brew tea, which you see in the picture below. Here again you see the tea spreading from the tea bag, but it comes out in those plumes and only slowly diffuses throughout the whole carafe.

This would of course be easier to see had I chosen a white background, but since I am still so touched that my friends showed up at the train station with a flower and a flag on Friday, and also since this is literally the spot I put the tea down after I had prepared it, you get to enjoy a view of my flower and flag!

Also that fake flower on the left makes for really interesting reflections on the carafe. Especially the top two that are joint in the middle!

Wave watching on the ferry from Kiel to Oslo!

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So I took the ferry from Kiel to Oslo and obviously had to document (most of) the water I saw :-)

Usually I’m quite fond of folding bridges and of ship watching. This folding bridge and tug, however, are between me and the ferry I want to catch…

Made it to the best place onboard (well, except on the bridge, possibly…). Phew!
Had a false positive test notification this morning (mind you, not a false positive test, but a poor overworked health person checking the wrong box and me thus getting the wrong text message) and even though that was sorted out within minutes, it was quite an exhausting experience! So now I really appreciate this nice spot on deck, my new rain jacket and my rain pants even more than if it had been uneventful and smooth until now… ;)

Great spot for wake watching, and the sun is even coming out intermittently!
Bye bye, Kiel, see you soon!

Awesome #WaveWatching going on!
Also: Not a lot of water here today!

See the turbulent track of another ship (blue), both sides of its V-Shaped wake (red & green) and where the wake breaks on a sand bank.

Might be difficult to see, but that’s the pilot boat just turning away from another ship. Yep, getting windy!

#wavewatching is definitely getting more interesting! And deck pretty much empty by now. Did not think I would be wearing my awesome gloves in August @kjersti.daae but am very glad I packed them on top of my luggage right with the wooly hat & rain pants

I’m not a #meteorologist but this looks … wet!

Look at how different the upwind and downwind sides of our wake look! Downwind there is consistent breaking of “the feathers of one side of the V”, upwind only some few break, but then they break somehow more spectacularly.

How the mood has changed! But note the difference between the upwind and downwind side of the wake!

Got some sun yesterday afternoon after all!

could stare into the turbulence of the ship’s propellers forever without getting bored!

Great belt bridge

Windy morning! Love this kind of #wavewatching (only slightly scared my phone will be blown out of my hands…)

That’s some nice waves! :)

Birthday weather (not mine :))
Always worth getting up for the sunrise…

How awesome are waves in the sun? Worth risking my phone for these kinds of pictures! (Yep, I should get some kind of case & strap…)

Sorry, couldn’t vacate my breakfast spot for a better angle, but look at that pretty wake! Those wavelets don’t cease to amaze me. Maybe I should get a seagoing job?

Wake watching in Oslofjord

One last Oslo fjord pic (beautiful wake!!) before we had to go back to our cabins for a very well-organized exit!

What I never noticed before today? That when the hatch to the car decks is opened, they split the bow — down to the bulbous bow — in half and move it away to the sides. Sadly I didn’t get a picture from the side where it’s nicely visible, didn’t have a free hand…

Still windy! See the gusts of wind move over the surface? (Well, I guess they don’t move in the picture, but you know what I mean…)

Fountain with a view

Now that’s my kind of water feature! Mesmerizing!

Don’t know why sculptures so often involve naked people, but this is one instance where I think it actually works

And now I’m exhausted. Let’s see how much water I’m going to see tomorrow! :)

#Methods2Go: methods to facilitate discussion in university teaching

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More method ideas from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions!

Today: methods to discuss content.

Amplifier

The idea of using an “amplifier” is really simple: after a mini lecture, students are asked to write questions on what they just heard on a piece of paper and hand it to a “lead-learner” or “amplifier”, who then asks those questions for everybody else. This lowers the threshold of asking questions, because they become anonymous and nobody has to worry about potentially looking stupid.

On the other hand, students also don’t practice speaking up and asking questions, so it might be good to have an exit plan for this method; i.e. only use this method for the first couple of lectures until students have gotten confident with asking questions in that format and have gained confidence that they won’t be ridiculed for their questions. As a next step, you could then do something like think-pair-share (where students still have the lower threshold of not asking questions in front of a large group, and but practice first in the pair, and then when someone speaks for the pair, they are at least not only speaking for themselves. And once students have gotten good at asking questions that way, maybe they are ready to just ask questions without any extra method, only maybe a little encouragement from the teacher’s side.

Silent discussion

This method I thought was funny: A question or statement is written on a poster and students add their comments in writing, without speaking. That’s basically what we’ve been doing for the last year and a half with discussion forums online! But what’s interesting is that what people love to hate online actually might not be all bad. There are clear advantages of occasionally writing things down instead of always communicating verbally: shy students might get the opportunity to participate more easily, thoughts are documented and can be referred to more easily no matter what other thoughts were brought up later, a documentation of the whole discussion is easily available. So enjoy this positive spin on discussion forums! :)

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to apply knowledge”.

What other methods do you like to facilitate discussion?

“Evaluating shallow water waves by observing Mach cones on the beach” — guest post by Felipe Veloso on his recent #WaveWatching article!

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Super excited to share a guest post today: Felipe is writing about his recent #WaveWatching article on “Evaluating shallow water waves by observing Mach cones on the beach”. I came across this article and was going to write a summary, but how much cooler is it to hear from Felipe himself? Thank you for being here! :)

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My name is Dr Felipe Veloso1 and I tremendously appreciate Dr Mirjam Glessmer invitation to write this post and letting me contribute to the terrific #WaveWatching collection!!

One of the spectacular things of #WaveWatching is that the observations are ubiquitous. It doesn’t matter if you live in Germany, USA, Japan or Chile. Oscillations and waves are there, whether you observe swimming pools, lakes, sea, or even a relaxing bathtub ready for you. In all cases, the water is always naturally oscillating in a comfortable dance combining up-and-down and back-and-forth movements. If you enjoy these natural phenomena like I do, invest some of your time and take a look to the wonderful #WaveWatchingWednesday and #KitchenOceanography collections that Mirjam has gathered for us. But there are some occasions that these wave phenomena are obscured to our naked-eye observations and a more careful revision is needed to figure out where these oscillations are hidden. A turbulent river coming down of a hill, or the simple passing of fast water flow in front of our eyes are some examples of “waves hidden at first sight”. Such situation occurred to me in the latest family vacations we had as a break from the lockdowns imposed by the pandemia. In particular, this situation became the reason of an article in Physics Education, and also the reason  of why I am writing these lines.

In an attempt to run away from the contaminated air of Santiago (the Chilean capital city, surrounded by mountains), we drove ~90 minutes to Viña del Mar city, to enjoy one week in the beach side. In this place, with the appropriate weather and personal calmness, families can enjoy the waves crushing the beach, the rising of children as “sand engineers”, and the “continuous fight” between these children and the ocean waves to avoid the destruction of the sand fortresses by the water. It is in this relaxing and family-friendly environment where my story begins.

My kids are playing in the sand and my feet are partially covered by water. After long time, we are able to come out from our houses after several months of mandatory quarantines, pandemic stress, and online teaching activities. In this particular moment, watching waves looks like a perfect panorama for me. Suddenly, the voice of my daughter Pilar wakes me up and asked me two questions: “Dad, what are you looking in the water?… and dad, why does the water creates those conical shapes at the end of the undertow current?” The first answer was easy. I was #WaveWatching. But the second answer was not so simple. What about those conical shapes?

Mach cones observed in the surface of undertow water produced by stationary millimeter grains/seashells in sand. Those feet belong to my daughter Pilar and myself. Image taken from the article.

Before her question, I haven’t thought on that. Rapidly, I realized I was observing a wave phenomena in a different and non-standard way. We were observing shock waves in the shape of Mach cones!! These cones appear when an object moves inside of a fluid with a relative velocity larger than the natural oscillation velocity of the fluid. In these situations, there is a shock occurring in the fluid itself. The tip of the cone (or V-) shape arises from the relative movement of the object, whereas the radial expansion of the wave creates the sides of the cone. This explains the formation of V-shapes in the water when a ship travels in a river, or when ducks swim in the lake. In the case of beach observations, the cones were originated by stationary small seashells or larger grains buried in the sand when the undertow water current returned back to the sea with depth not sufficient to immerse my toes.

Now, I am not really sure if my 8 years-old daughter or my 11 years-old son understood completely my explanations of waves and Mach cones. But, I am sure they understood that observing nature can be a fun and relaxing activity to enjoy in family vacations. As an exercise, I taught them how to compute the wave velocity by measuring these Mach cones. I also show them that we did not need any fancy or expensive equipment to accurately evaluate it. We only require interest and fascination on looking for an explanation of a natural phenomena… a phenomena that they could observe while enjoying the beach, the sand and the family time.

Family picture in Viña del Mar. My beautiful wife Alicia, my kids Diego and Pilar and myself. And of course, our dear dog Chewbacca trying to run away from the camera.

Further details can be found in the paper: Felipe Veloso (2021) “Evaluating shallow water waves by observing Mach cones on the beach” Phys Education 56, 054001.

  1. @fvelosoe in Instagram and Twitter