#Methods2Go: university teaching methods for acquring knowledge

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

Today: methods to acquire knowledge.

Learning-speed duo

The “learning-speed duo” method works like this: The group is split into two, and everybody in each of the two sub-group gets the same text to read (or exercise to work on) individually. When people finish the task, they (non-verbally!) signal to the teacher, who then pairs them up with someone from the other group who has finished their task, too. The two of them then explain to each other what they just read/learned/did.

I really like the idea behind this method that different learning tempos are taken care of so that fast students don’t just sit and wait for everybody else to finish. But this could potentially increase pre-existing inequalities when the “strongest” students get paired up first, and then pairs get “weaker” over time (obviously, speed is not the best indicator of “strength”, they might also be less careful). But still, it might appear to students that there is a hierarchy implied if attention is drawn to how fast they finish a task.

Also I wonder how much disturbance is introduced in the classroom when students have to physically relocate to form the new pairs, and then start discussing. So I am wondering if this method wouldn’t work much better online, when you initially have two breakout rooms (or even just assign two different tasks to everybody in your main room) and when students DM the instructor that they have finished the task, they are sent into breakout rooms with a partner who worked on the other task. As an instructor, you would need to coordinate this carefully, but I can see that working well without too much of a disruption to people still working on the initial task, and also without drawing a lot of attention to how fast someone is working.

Sandwich

I had heard of the sandwich method to give feedback (not a fan — I very much prefer the continue-start-stop method!), but wasn’t aware of this method of the same name!

For this sandwich, the teacher presents a task and asks students to think about how that task could be solved. Student suggestions for what methods could be used or how one would start working on the task are collected. This is the bottom bun, the base of the sandwich.

The teacher then explains whatever they think needs to be explained in order to solve the task: theories, methods, ways to calculate certain things, … This is the salad, cheese or whatever other interesting stuff inside the sandwich.

Students then use this to actually do the task: this is the top of the sandwich.

What I like about this method is the suggestion of explicitly giving students room to brainstorm and discuss ways to approach and solve a task before students start working on it; making sure that everybody has the necessary background information and clues to start working on it, rather than discussing all of this after students were supposed to have solved it (when some students are demotivated already because they couldn’t do it, and others don’t need that discussion any more because they had already successfully done it).

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

What other methods do you like for fascilitating knowledge acquisition?

When flying turns out to not be essential for academia (after Jack & Glover, 2021)

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Yesterday morning on Twitter, I saw this quote: “The sudden grounding of academics has demonstrated that air travel ‒ previously deemed a necessary part of a successful academic career and university internationalization ‒ was not in fact essential.”. This, naturally, led me directly to the original article on “Online conferencing in the midst of COVID-19: an “already existing experiment” in academic internationalization without air travel” by Jack & Glover (2021).

In the article, the authors use the “already existing experiment” — academics around the world being grounded due to covid19 — to look at what alternatives for traditionally physical conferences exist and how they compare both to the traditional physical conferences, and among each other. And their bottom line is quite clear: Even though many people felt they “had” to fly to conferences to stay competitive in academia, there are other ways than physical presence to network and lead scientific discussions than being physically present (or, and that’s my comment here, at least as long as that’s what most people do).

Both synchronous and asynchronous virtual conferences have many benefits over actual physical conferences, for example that they are a lot easier to attend: they are cheaper, reduced travel time makes it “worthwhile” to attend more events, combining them with e.g. caring responsibilities is a lot easier since they can be attended from home. This leads to academics attending more, and more diverse, events, possibly organised in regions of the world that they would otherwise not have considered for physical conferences, which means that access to conferences (and all the scientific discussions and networking benefits ascribed to them) becomes a lot more accessible. Also, for some academics, the threshold to network and enter discussions are substantially lowered when they are happening in an online format.

At the same time, they do have challenges that are different from the ones experienced at physical conferences, e.g. for synchronous conferences the different time zones of participants need to be considered. Conference sessions outside of normal working hours might conflict with other responsibilities (or sleep!), creating a different set of problems, or a distribution of attendants based on what time zones are convenient given their physical location. In any case, boundaries between work and home might become blurred, and participants might not be as engaged in the conference if they can use the time to simultaneously (and without detection) do home chores or other things. Also, screen fatigue is real and can become a problem. Lastly, virtual interactions might be experienced “as less energizing and inspiring than face-to-face interactions”.

And while this is certainly all true, I want to offer my own perspective on this last point. I am running a workshop on “taking ownership of your own mentoring” quite regularly, and have done so both before and during the pandemic. The workshop is always advertised as “something to do with networking”, and participants freely choose to participate (or not, which is when they are not part of my sample). This means that my participants are usually people that feel like they want to learn more about networking, and while during the pandemic there has been a very much increased amount of questions regarding building and maintaining networks online via social media, there are still many questions and anxieties related to how to use physical conferences in order to make new contacts and engage in discussions with new people. So this assumption that seems to be generally out in the world that conferences are the best way to build networks, needs at least be qualified to include “…when participants know how to do it”. Just last week I heard from a quite deflated participant of a recent networking event, one of the first in-person events taking place again, where this participant did not talk to anyone they didn’t already know and were wondering how they could have approached some people that they would actually really have liked to meet, but then ended up only observing from across the room. So I would argue that there is a need for opportunities to learn how to use both formats, physical and virtual conferences, to their best advantage!

As for the energizing and inspiring face-to-face meetings: I feel like that also depends on the kind of interactions happening virtually. Since May 2020, I have started working with a new group of people, many of which I did not know before and have never met in person, and some of the (virtual!) meetings I have had with them have been the most significant, energizing, inspiring meetings I have ever had. So I see a huge potential in virtual meetings that for many others doesn’t have seem to materialized in the same way.

I also see many people waiting “to get back to normal”, meaning flying around the world like before covid19, and it worries me, especially when those flights then don’t result in all the networking and discussions people were hoping for, but in frustrated academics that wish they had talked to someone that they instead only saw from across the room. Jack & Glover (2021) make a strong case of the greenhouse gas emissions that can be avoided if academic travel is scaled down (which is actually an important part of their article that I just glossed over, it seems so obvious to me that we should be flying less or not at all for exactly that reason!), and call for those in charge (like funders) to make sure that air travel isn’t incentivized, but I am expecting things to pick up substantially once travel becomes easier again, unless we make sure that people don’t feel like it will be a huge hit to their careers if they opt out of flying when their peers don’t.

I think we need to work on two things: Create spaces to help fulfil people’s networking and discussion needs in virtual settings, and equip them with the skills to actually do efficient networking and discussing when they want to do it, both in virtual or in-person settings. Of course there are many awesome initiatives out there to do both, but how do we make sure people even know about them and feel comfortable and confident using them? And how do we do it before people are back to their old flying ways and feel again like they cannot opt out of it without hurting their careers?

Tullia Jack & Andrew Glover (2021) Online conferencing in the midst of COVID-19: an “already existing experiment” in academic internationalization without air travel, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy,17:1, 293-307, DOI: 10.1080/15487733.2021.1946297

#Methods2Go: Ideas for starting off your university classes (inspired by EM Schumacher’s work)

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“Methoden to go” by E.-M. Schumacher, which you see in the picture above, is a handy collection of well- and less-well-known methods for university teaching, organised by the six different phases of a typical session (getting into a topic, learning about a topic, discussing it, applying knowledge, securing results, and ending a lesson). It’s a collection of colourful flashcards that are loosely bound together, with a short description of a method on either side. I love the format — it’s playful and great to browse for inspiration; flipping through the cards is fun!

I recently re-discovered my copy and want to share a couple of the methods with you: the ones that sparked images in my head right away. But check out the method pool on the constructif website (in German, but many of the methods have english titles so you can either guess or google them) for a more comprehensive overview!

Today: methods to start off your lessons

Awaking interest

One idea to start off your lessons is to find something that sparks student interest in the topic you want to discuss. You could for example use quotes, snippets from movies, or provocative statements. These work especially well when students have an easy way to relate to them, for example because they are related to things that are relevant in their own lives or to their future in the profession.

Examples that come to mind:

1. A really fun question like Kjersti‘s below: How can you cool down a beer most efficiently when you are outdoors? Isn’t this intriguing even when you have no idea what the lecture is about?

Multiple choice question by Kjersti Daae, used with permission

This can be used as a multiple choice question at the beginning of the class, or just shown then and only picked up again at the end of the class, hopefully inspiring the students to pay attention in order to figure out the answer along the way.

2. Fun memes. I remember starting classes on ocean salinity with one showing a shark and saying something like “Did you know? The ocean is salty because of the tears of misunderstood sharks that just want to play” (tried to find the original source, but there are so many variations of this out there that I couldn’t be sure). Even though it’s probably obvious that this is not the answer we are going for, it still raises the question “why is the ocean salty” in a fun and playful way.

3. Interesting applications. I used to have a picture of a car with its heavy load poking through the front windscreen — it had clearly not been secured properly when the driver suddenly had to brake. Inertia can really be tricky… What’s great about such a picture is that it makes the relevance of an otherwise quite abstract and hard to imagine concept absolutely obvious.

I like having questions and pictures like these up on the screen while students enter the (virtual) room to get them thinking about the upcoming session. If you are really ambitious (in a good way!) you could also rotate through a slide deck with several types of prompts for thought/discussion…

Fast networking

Students interview each other on the topic of the upcoming lesson (maybe there could be an overall question or prompt that they are trying to find information for?) and visualise the results. This activates prior knowledge and, through the visualization bit, also puts different snippets of knowledge into relation with each other.

What’s different from “talk to your neighbour about this for a minute”? The clear roles of interviewer/interviewee facilitate a conversation more easily, especially with students that don’t know each other well and/or are shy.

Living statistics (sometimes also called sociometry)

This is a method that I have used a lot but had forgotten about now that things have been online for me in what feels like forever: asking questions and assigning spaces in the room for different answer options, and have students move around the room to answer them. This method is great when facilitating students getting to know each other, e.g. asking them to place themselves on an imaginary map of where they were born (without too clearly prescribing what is where, so that students need to talk to each other to figure out where to place themselves relative to each other), how much prior knowledge they have, what fields they come from in interdisciplinary courses, … It’s usually easier to remember who stood close by in response to a certain question than to remember everybody that had put their hand up, and especially in large classes where students don’t know each other yet, that is really helpful!

Place mat

For the “place mat” method, three or four students sit around a table together and simultaneously write their thoughts on a given question on a large sheet of paper, each in their own corner. After a while they then compile their thoughts into common notes in the middle of the piece of paper. Those common thoughts are then later shared with the whole group.

I really like this method because I am a big fan of note-taking, both to facilitate individual thinking as well as in group discussions. When I teach virtually, I often use a shared google slides document, in which each group is taking notes on their own slide. This is great for several reasons: a) students take notes so no ideas get lost between when they talk about it and later present it to the large group, b) I can “spy” on the groups’ progress and adjust the length of breakout sessions without interrupting groups by popping in on them, c) I get an idea of what they are discussing and can prepare a strategy for how I want to bring the points from different groups up in the following discussion with the whole group.

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

What other methods do you like for active starts of your lessons?

Enacting frames of reference in geoscience education? (After Rollinde, Decamp and Derniaux, 2021)

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I just read a super interesting article by Rollinde, Decamp ad Derniaux (2021) on “Should frames of reference be enacted in astronomy instruction?”. Frames of reference are an important concept in the geosciences, and one that is difficult to grasp as we’ve noticed when teaching about Coriolis force and how trajectories look differently depending on whether we observe them on the rotating table from the lab’s frame of reference, or via the co-rotating camera. So what Rollinde et al. propose here is intriguing: Using embodied cognition to teach about frames of reference? The idea is that when students use their bodies to represent movements of e.g. planets in the solar system, it becomes easier to switch between different frames of reference, and understand that they are just different ways of describing the same motion, even though speeds, distances, shape of trajectories depend on which representation one chooses.

In the article, the goal is to teach about the movements or the Earth, Mars, and the Sun over a day or a year. Those are investigated from three different frames of references, a terrestrial, a geocentric, and a heliocentric one. Students investigated the movements by using either a printed model on which they trace the movements with their fingers, or a large version drawn on the ground, which several students walk on, representing the different objects. I find this idea intriguing — I know that in the one case where I’ve used a similar embodied experience before (to explain why sound is refracted towards the areas of lowest speed, or why waves turn towards the beach), it has left a lasting impression.

Unfortunately, the authors did not have a classical “non-embodied” control group, so we don’t know whether their two approaches work better than any of the classical ones. But what they do find is that both seem to work well, and that — contrary to their expectations — the large one where students actually walked on the diagrams did not work better than the smaller ones. They suggest that there might be several reasons for this: having to coordinate the whole body and with other people might constitute a high cognitive load, drawing resources away from otherwise processing what’s going on. Also having other people, and especially the teacher, looking at their bodies might make them self-conscious, again drawing capacities away from where they would be best allocated for learning.

But in any case, I find the suggestion of using embodied learning in such a way in geoscience education fascinating. It seems quite unusual, and might not be feasible in all cases, but it’s definitely something that I’ll keep in mind as one possible strategy to be considered in the future!

What do you think? Would that work for your topic and your students?

Rollinde, E., Decamp, N. & Derniaux, C. (2021). Should frames of reference be enacted in astronomy instruction?. Physical Review. Physics Education Research, 17(1). (pdf here)

Teaching inspiration dispenser

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I just had this fun (I think) idea of a “teaching inspiration dispenser” for faculty development (inspired by Laura’s Instagram post on her experience with a @shortedition kiosk): I basically want a receipt printer, located somewhere centrally on campus, that gives out small pieces of paper with teaching inspiration or tips when people press a button.

It can be charged with new ideas

  • from every teaching workshop that happens (we’d just ask people to write minute papers at the end with their best teaching tip; either one of their own, something they heard about, or the best idea they got during the workshop),
  • from what students wish teachers thought of,
  • from what the Centre for Teaching and Learning thinks is good advice or inspiring to think about,
  • from what visiting scientists share,
  • from what we read or hear about,
  • …

All we need is a really short text (maybe with the author’s name and date, to make it more personal and relatable?), and then there need to be a couple of dozen of those in storage, so people are not likely to get the same one too often if they are repeat customers.

I think something like that would be awesome to

  • just share interesting ideas (“Mmh, I wonder if I should try…”),
  • generate conversation (“Guess what the teaching inspiration dispenser told me this morning?”),
  • be a collectible item that people put on their pin boards above their desks or maybe even swap or pass on to someone else who they think might benefit from the idea,
  • represent artefacts of collective learning as the database behind it grows.

There is of course also the much more boring low-tech version (much less appealing that pressing a button and seeing paper coming out!) where we just have a big bowl of folded pieces of paper where people pick one. We could colour-code the paper, e.g. the light green spring edition of newly added pieces of paper, or the red ones are for large classes. People could also easily put in their own pieces if they wanted to contribute; that way it’s not moderated and thus more democratic. So maybe it’s an equally good or even better option?

I’m the kind of person who would really love getting the physical piece of paper, sticking it in my bag, finding it weeks later and being reminded of the thing I wanted to try in my teaching. Even though I get so much inspiration and so many ideas from social media, podcasts, blog posts, books — just having a small piece of paper with an interesting thought would really appeal to me. A bit like a fortune cookie, except with some useful advice and minus the cookie (not a fan, but YMMV. Maybe the teaching inspiration cookie would be something for you?).

What do you think? Would you enjoy getting teaching inspiration that way? Would you want the automated dispenser or would you prefer to pick from a bowl?