Category Archives: method

Flipping the classroom

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How can we make sure students actually prepare for the next session?

This post is a work-in-progress – I am working on flipping my first ever class, and this is a collection of my thoughts on the matter which I thought might be interesting to others, too. But I will definitely come back to the topic later once I have more experiences! But let’s get started:

What is a flipped classroom?

If you are following discussions in higher education, you’ve certainly come across the idea of a “flipped classroom”. What it means in a nutshell is that anything that takes a lot of studying and practicing, but isn’t particularly hard, is moved out of the classroom, so that class time can be used on difficult tasks where students need the instructor’s help. So instead of gathering for content transfer, people gather for things you need to gather for: interactions and discussions.

Why flip your class?

There are many good reasons for flipping your class. In no particular order:

  • face-to-face class time is typically limited to 2 to 4 hours per week, so in order to make the best use of it, students should make the most of having an expert present
  • most parts of a typical lecture are basically the same as listening to any random person read from a script on a topic. Yes, of course the typical lecturer comments spontaneously on occasion, but compared to “reading time”, those are very short moments, few and far between
  • the difference between passively listening to a lecture and passively listen to a video of a lecture is not very large (provided the video has good quality)
  • “learning facts” is not really difficult. Making sense is. So this is where the instructor should be supporting the students (for example by giving them the opportunity to discuss during a lecture)

How do you flip your class?

So now everybody is talking about flipping their classes. But how do you actually do it?

We are currently working on the first course to be completely flipped, and here are some concerns we have and some ideas I’ve either heard of somewhere or had myself. I’ll let you know how well they worked after we’ve actually tried…

  • How do we make sure students come to class prepared?

This seems to be the biggest worry, which I completely understand. Interestingly, everybody who has tried flipping their class says that it is actually not an issue: Students do realize that if they are not prepared, they won’t gain anything from coming to class. So they come prepared.

But of course there are strategies that can be implemented in order to feel more secure in the beginning:

– Make sure every student gets the opportunity to ask their questions on the topic so students recognize the value of using that time for their own progression.

– Peer pressure. If students work in fixed groups throughout the whole course, group dynamics will tend to make sure everybody pulls their weight.

– Implement a control system: Make pre-class tests grade-relevant or award bonus points.

  • How do I decide which materials the students should be studying in preparation for my class?

I really like this question, because I’ve never been asked this for a regular lecture! Even though, of course, this question should always be asked. I think, the answer in this case is fairly easy. You know what kind of activity you will want to do during the class. Have students discuss a certain problem? Then they will have read about that problem beforehand. Apply a method to a new type of problem? Then they should have practiced applying that method to the “regular” type of problem beforehand. Talk about a new topic in a foreign language? Then they need to study the relevant technical terms before coming to class.

Basically, we need to figure out what we want students to be able to do once they are in class, and from there we can go to what information they need in order to do it, and provide that information (see my post on constructive alignment).

  • But what if I don’t want videos of my face floating about the internet?

While videos seem to be the preferred medium for content-delivery outside of a flipped classroom, this does not mean that your face has to be visible. You could use screen casts, where you show your slides and add your voice, or you could use other people’s videos which you edit together or ensemble to a playlist, or you could use podcasts or written materials instead of videos. Or you could put your videos on a protected learning management system, but of course then there is no guarantee then that the materials won’t end up on the open internet eventually.

And this is where I am currently at when it comes to flipping a class. I’ll get back to you once we’ve actually tried!

P.S.: Here is a very interesting blog post by Ryan Kilcullen, who discusses a flipped class from a student’s perspective. Make sure to also read the great comments on that post!

Constructive alignment

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Or: Think first about what you want students to be able to do, then about what they need to learn in order to do it.

One term that I’ve noticed I am referring to in blog posts without ever having actually talked about what I mean by it is “constructive alignment”. It is the most fundamental idea underlying my work, so this post is about what I mean by “constructive alignment”.

What is constructive alignment?

Constructive alignment focusses on what students will be able to do after having attended a class or course, and on how you can design assessment to make sure to measure whether they now are able to do, and on how to design your teaching to help them do.

Constructive alignment originally goes back to Biggs and Tang, and here is a nice guide by those authors. My own use of the term differs slightly, because this is how we use it at work and I want to stay consistent with that.

Why do constructive alignment?

At a day and age where factual knowledge increases exponentially, it is important to not focus too much on conveying information, but more on helping students develop skills to do something with all that information.

Also, the “constructive” in “constructive alignment” refers to the understanding that you cannot funnel meaning from a book or your brain into the students’ brains, but that students have to construct their own meaning. So rather than focussing on telling them exactly what you are thinking and why, the idea is to have them think on their own, supported by activities you designed to guide them in the right direction.

How can you implement the idea of constructive alignment in your teaching?

The most important step, in my opinion, is to recognize that you need to think about skills you want students to have at the end of your course rather than topics you want to have talked about. Of course, there is a lot of factual knowledge that everybody needs to learn regardless. But if you think about it, often it is more important that students recognize the kind of problem they are dealing with and then look up the exact value of a constant or form of a solver, than knowing the constants and solvers by heart and not being able to apply them correctly. Because just because you have talked about something in your lecture does not mean that students have understood it and are able to apply it.

So in a first step, the learning goals are defined. Then, you think about how you could actually measure whether students have reached those goals (this is the point where you notice that “differential equations” are not a good learning goal, whereas “solving DEs”, “formulating DEs”, “classify different kinds of DEs” are a lot better, because they already give you an indication of how you can assess whether the goal has been met). And then from your assessment, you think about how you will prepare your students for the assessment, i.e. what teaching methods you will need to use and what materials should be provided.

To me, the idea of constructive alignment makes a lot of sense. But it does seem weird to not start out by gathering all the important slides you want to show and then come up with a story to connect them (or isn’t that how you prepare your lectures?) but to rather take the path indicated above. However, it does get easier over time, especially once you start getting the feedback that students do have better conceptual understanding and higher skill levels than before. So maybe give it a try?

(As with everything – you don’t have to jump in head first if you are hesitant. Try it out for one particular session and see how it goes! And then as you get bolder, you can design a whole course this way, and maybe eventually even the curriculum. It’s worth it!)

Activating students – a vicious circle?

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Can we become “too motivating”?

One thing I’ve been pondering recently are vicious circles, especially in teaching and learning contexts.

Imagine this situation:

You observe that your students are not as active as you would like them to be. Hence you change something in your teaching to make them become more active: You act more entertaining, you include more peer instruction, you add clickers. Initially, your students respond, but then you notice that the more effort you put into keeping them active, the less activity they show by themselves. Hence you become even more active.

What is going on?

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Motivating students – a vicious circle?

You might have gotten caught in a vicious circle. So how do you get out again and make them take on responsibility for their own learning?

The first thing to note with vicious circles is that you are caught in one. And that even though there are several players in a vicious circle, you can only influence what you do in reaction to the other player, and how you interpret their reaction. So even though they seem to expect more entertainment from you, that does not mean that you have to provide it.

A good start would be to decide for yourself how far you want to go in “activating” your students, and from which point onwards you think they should really take on the responsibility themselves. And then, all you can do is stick to your decision. Sorry ;-) No, kidding. Basically you’ll have to help them find intrinsic motivation. Which sounds contradictory in itself. But we’ll talk about your options in a later post.

Problem-based learning: Solar eclipse, part II

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PBL – the final steps.

Two weeks ago, I described the first five steps of the problem-based learning (PBL) method. Last week, we continued with the workshop and went through the final steps.

Step 6, the research phase, was completed over the week between the two workshops: Everybody worked on questions related to observing the solar eclipse safely. Results of this step were brought together last Friday in step 7:

Step 7 then finally happened on the day of the solar eclipse, March 20th. Everybody was supposed to bring the answers to the questions as well as some sort of equipment made from “household items”. This is what we ended up with:

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Participants of the PBL workshop watching the solar eclipse using many different methods. Picture by Alina Gruhn (thanks! :-))

I am going to describe all the different methods in Wednesday’s post, but today I want to focus on the PBL method. We had planned the workshop from 9:30 to 12 am, which luckily coincided pretty much exactly with the solar eclipse. Originally, we wanted to follow the method, i.e. bring together everybody’s results and discuss their merits, and only then start our observation. The idea was to watch over the period of maximum coverage because we thought that would be the most exciting part.

Luckily, though, facilitator Siska was flexible enough* to let us start observing only a couple of minutes into the workshop, when someone realized that we could actually see the moon moving in front of the sun. Everybody got super excited and we even brought in our colleagues who didn’t participate in the workshop to watch with us.

After a while we got back to work, and then clouds started to appear and the weather changed completely. While we had had completely clear, blue skies during the observation, it now became overcast and foggy. Good thing we didn’t wait!

So there were a lot of things to be learned during that workshop, too. (Remember, the topic of the workshop wasn’t really the solar eclipse – we had just used it as an example case. The real goal was for instructors to experience the method before they are to use it in their own teaching!). For example: If your group gets excited during the process – let them run free for a bit and use the momentum to your advantage. You miss the best learning opportunities if you don’t!

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* need more proof of her flexibility? She was only that very morning told that she would have to fill in for Marisa, who wasn’t well enough to continue running the workshop!

 

Problem-Based Learning: Solar eclipse

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Workshop on PBL, using the upcoming solar eclipse (on Friday!) as a case study.

I am currently attending a workshop run by one of my all-time favorite colleagues, Marisa, on Problem-Based Learning. The workshop is aimed at people who want to use PBL in their teaching, and is split into three sessions. By pure dumb luck I realized that the second session will be on March 20th, the day of the solar eclipse. So of course I had to hijack the workshop a make her write a case study on that topic! (We really had to – I don’t think we could expect anyone to sit inside and work on some old case study if a solar eclipse was happening outside).

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Marisa teaching us how to use PBL

I am going to use that case and that workshop to talk you through the concept of problem–based learning.

The solar eclipse case.

In a nutshell, this is our case: Imagine it’s your god-daughter’s 7th Birthday on March 20th, 2015. She’s super into astronomy and you want to watch the solar eclipse with her. You don’t want to buy equipment, but you know she gets very excited and therefore need to make sure she’s ok. What do you do?

The seven steps of PBL

During the first workshop last Friday, we went through steps 1 to 5 of the Maastricht PBL model. Before the first step, Marisa gave a brief introduction to the method, and picked someone to document the discussion. Usually you would also pick someone to lead the discussion, but since we were all inexperienced with the method, Marisa took that role herself – something she’s recommend we do the first time we do PBL in class, too.

1. Clarifying terms

In this step, participants read the case and make sure they understand all the terms. For example, in our case, people discussed “equipment”, “household items” (which we had said they could only use for their equipment) and “solar eclipse”. Discussion here is merely to clarify that everybody reads the case the same way – if terms came up that we couldn’t come to an agreement on in this step, we wouldn’t do research now but postpone it to step 2.

2. Defining the problem

Here, all possible questions that we might want to answer during this PBL case were collected. Again, we were not answering anything yet, just collecting facets of the problem that people thought were interesting and should be investigated. For us, this meant for example “what can we use to protect our eyes?”, “will we need to make sure our god-daughter gets out of school so we can take her to watch the solar eclipse?”, “how much background do we want to convey to her?”.

The second question – about how we’d get her out of school, was answered by Marisa: We can assume that that is not an issue. So here the tutor can interfere and guide the discussion if it leads too far from the desired learning goals.

3. Brainstorming

In this step, we collect all kinds of possible answers to the questions brought up in step 2. Since this is still a brainstorming phase, they should not be judged or discussed, just collected. So for example we came up with different activities that we could pursue with her in case the weather was bad or possibly for giving her a bit of a theoretical background before watching the solar eclipse.

4. Structuring and hypothesis

Now we took keywords from phase 2 and 3 and sorted them. As a group, we didn’t actually decide on whether to sort by importance or by logical order of steps (so for example if we looked at the weather forecast and were sure we would not be able to see anything, we would not need to look into eye protection, however eye protection seems really important and also fun to investigate). It was interesting to see how it led to quite some frustration that people weren’t sorting following the same criteria, yet nobody “made” the group decide which criteria they wanted to use.

5. Learning objectives

In this step, the structure found in step 4 is being written up in complete questions – those are the questions that will be answered later.

So all that is missing now are steps 6, “Searching for Information”, which students are currently doing and which should be finished by Friday, and 7, “Synthesis”, which we will do on Friday.

Working with people who will later use PBL in their teaching, one of the important points was to let them experience what it is like to be a student in a PBL setting. Seeing how frustrated some people got, and how we really often didn’t know what to do was super important to get an idea of what it would be like for our students.

Until now, nothing “step 6″ish has happened. I am curious how much work outside of the workshop is going to get done, and if it will get done by a group or by individuals. I’m kinda itching to get the group together to discuss, but I’m going to try to not do it and see what happens.

I’ll keep you posted on my experience with step 6 and 7, on how I can see myself using this method, and on how things turn out :-)

Thought experiments

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How do you deal with experiments that you would loooove to run in your course but just can’t?

We are currently working on a guide to instructing lab experiments. A colleague is writing on a piece on thought experiments, one of which I found super interesting.

Thought experiments are quite common in philosophy. Think, for example, of the one where a person has to decide whether or not to pull the switch that sends an out-of-control trolley on that branch of its tracks where it will kill one person, rather than not interfering and letting it drive straight ahead, killing five people. Or another example: the prisoners’ dilemma where confessing to a crime is in each prisoner’s best interest, but remaining silent would be the optimal solution for all prisoners taken together. While those are interesting in themselves, thought experiments can be directly relevant in science teaching, too.

The example my colleague talks about, for example, is a free fall experiment. Two metal balls, a large one and a small one, are connected with a chain, and dropped. Conventional wisdom would dictate that the heavier ball drops faster than the lighter one. However, since the two balls are connected, the lighter ball should slow down the heavier one a little bit, making the whole system fall slower than the heavy ball, yet faster than the lighter one. On the other hand, since the two balls are connected, this system is heavier than either of the balls individually, and should hence fall even faster than either of the balls. The only way to solve this contradiction is to have both balls fall at the same rate – which is what happens in reality (when friction is neglected at least).

Now the really interesting question is this one: How can we use this in our teaching? One could imagine using a similar thought experiment before running an actual experiment. Or to use thought experiments in cases where running “real” experiments is too expensive or not feasible for other reasons.

Einstein’s elevator, for example, discusses how you cannot distinguish whether an object you drop falls down due to gravity, or whether the floor accelerates towards the object if you happened to be in a space ship. There are ways to experimentally show that the effect is the same in both cases, but conducting this experiment as a thought experiment requires a lot less resources.

Another example is that of the scientist who works on colors, but has only ever seen black and white, due to some weird glasses that she has to wear day and night. She knows everything there is to know about color vision from an academic point of view: which wavelength of light has which name, what happens when the light hits our eyes, how the information is transmitted to the brain and how it is then processed. But what would happen if that scientist ever took off her glasses and, for the first time ever, saw color? This is a really nice thought experiment on how we cannot know what we don’t know.

How would you use thought experiments in your teaching?

On grading strategies.

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How do you deal with grading to make it less painful?

Talking to a friend who had to grade a lot of exams recently I mentioned a post I had written on how to make grading less painful, only to realize later that I wrote that post, but never actually posted it! So here we go now:

Last semester student numbers in the course I taught went back to less than 1/3rd of the previous year’s numbers. And yet – grading was a huge pain. So I’ve been thinking about strategies that make grading bearable.

The main thing that helps me is to make very explicit rubrics when I design the exam, long before I start grading. I think about what is the minimum requirement for each answer, and what is the level that I would expect for a B. How important are the different answers relative to each other (and hence how many points should they contribute to the final score).

But then when it comes to grading, this is what I do.

I lock myself in to avoid colleagues coming to talk to me and distract me (if at all possible – this year it was not).

I disconnect from the internet to avoid distraction.

I make sure I have enough water to drink very close by.

I go through all the same questions in all the exams before moving on to the next question and looking at that one on all the exams. This helps to make sure grading stays consistent between students.

I also look at a couple of exams before I write down the first grades, it usually takes an adjustment period.

I remind myself of how far the students have come during the course. Sometimes I look back at very early assignments if I need a reminder of where they started from.

I move around. Seriously, grading standing (or at least getting up repeatedly and walking and stretching) really helps.

I look back at early papers I wrote as a student. That really helps putting things into perspective.

I keep mental lists of the most ridiculous answers for my own entertainment (but would obviously not share them, no matter how tempting that might be).

And most importantly: I just do it. Procrastination is really not your friend when it comes to grading…

What do you think? And ideas? Comments? Suggestions? Please share!

What do I want from my students – sense-making or answer-making?

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On different approaches to peer-instruction and why one might want to use them.

Having sat in many different lectures by many different professors over the last year, and having given feedback on the methods used in most of those lectures, I find myself wondering how we can define a standard or even best practice for using clickers. Even when professors go through the classical Mazur steps, there are so many different ways they interpret those! Do we, for example, make sure that the first vote is really an individual vote, so that no interaction happened between students before they have to make this very first decision? I have not seen that implemented at my university. But does that matter? And why would one decide for or against it? I would guess that in most cases I have observed there was really no conscious decision being made – things just happen to happen a certain way.

A paper that I liked a lot and which describes a framework for describing and capturing instructional choices is “Not all interactive engagement is the same: Variations in physics professors’ implementation of Peer Instruction” by Turpen and Finkelstein (2009). I don’t want to talk about their framework as such, but there are a couple of questions they ask that I think are a helpful basis for reflection on our own teaching practices. For example there are questions clustering around the topic of listening to students and using the information from their answers. For example “what do I want students to learn, and what do I want to learn from the students?” might seem basic at first, but it is really not. What do I want students to learn? No matter what it is, what this question implies is “is the clicker question I am about to ask going to help them in that endeavor?”. The clicker question might be just testing knowledge, or it might make students think about a specific concept which they might get an even better grasp of by reflecting on your question.

And what do I want to learn from my students? The initial reaction of people I have talked with over the last year or so is puzzlement at this question. Why would I want to learn anything from my students? I am there to teach, they are there to learn. But is there really any point in asking questions if you are not trying to learn from them? Maybe not “learn” as in “learn new content”, but learn about their grasp of the topic, their learning process, where they are at right now. Do I use clicker questions as a way to test their knowledge, to inform my next steps during the class, to help them get a deeper understanding of the topic, to make them discuss? Those are all worthwhile goals, for sure, but they are different. And any one clicker question might or might not be able to help with all of those goals.

Another question is “do I need to listen to students’ ideas and reasoning and what are the benefits of listening to students’ ideas?”. Again, this is a question that I am guessing many people I have recently worked with would find strange. Why would I listen to student reasoning that doesn’t lead to the correct answer, or student reasoning that is different from how I want them to reason? Yes, I might learn something about where they go wrong, which might make it easier for me support them in getting it right. But isn’t it a really bad idea to expose the other students to something that is wrong? I would argue that no, it is not a bad idea. Students need to learn to distinguish between good reasoning and bad reasoning. And they can only do that if they see both good and bad reasoning, and learn to figure out why one is good and one is bad. I know many people are very reluctant of having students explain their reasoning that lead them to a wrong answer. It takes time and it doesn’t seem to lead towards the correct answer. But then what do we want? Answer-making or sense-making? Sense-making might involve taking a wrong turn occasionally, and realizing why it was a wrong turn before taking the right turn in the end. If the wrong answer isn’t elicited, it can’t be confronted or resolved.

I would really recommend you go read that paper. The authors are describing different instructional choices different instructors made, for example how they interact with students during the clicker questions. Did they leave the stage? Did they answer student questions? Did they discuss with students? (And yes, answering questions and discussing with students is not necessarily the same!). Even though there is not one single best practice to using clickers, it is definitely beneficial to reflect on different kinds of practice, or, at to at least become aware that there ARE different kinds of practice. Plenty to think about!

 

First day of class

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…because there are always classes starting somewhere or other…

Ever wondered what a good practice for your first day of class might be? I started talking about this with colleagues prompted by a video on the coursera course on evidence-based undergraduate #STEMTeaching (which, btw, I recommend you put on your watch-list and take it as soon as it becomes available again! It was really that good!). The video showed a dramatization of a not-very-good first-day-of-class speech, and my colleagues and I used it as a starting point to come up with a good practice list of what should (and should not!) be included in such a speech.

It turned out that we came up with a very long list, and many of the items on that list were a bit know-your-audience. But then I came across a document by L.D. Fink (1999): First day of class: What can/should we do? and it provides a really nice summary of things I personally think are important. Below is my own take on their points:

  1. Involve students quickly. This way, students know that they are expected to actively participate in this specific course (even if not in other courses). Also for many people, it is pretty important to hear your own voice in a new setting fairly early on in order to not build up a threshold of “I haven’t spoken until now, so what if I start now – how will people react?”. Have them speak to their neighbors if the class is too large for everybody to introduce themselves in front of the whole class, but make them talk.
  2. Identify the value and importance of the subject. Even though you yourself know that your course is the most fascinating course on the most fascinating topic one could possibly imagine, many students might be in your class because it’s a requirement. So it is a good idea point out the relevance of the subject early on. And it’s an even better idea to have them figure it out themselves, for example by asking them to draw mind maps, for example on what they might need to know about your subject in order to solve a specific problem. You can then for example take up the topics they come up with, cluster them and relate them to your curriculum.
  3. Set expectations. It will be very hard to get students to actively participate once they have come to expect that your class is one where one can largely sit and listen. Also respectful behavior is a lot more likely if it is modeled and lived from the get-go rather than reinforced later on. Let students know what your class will be like, what the rules are, how much participation you expect, these kinds of things.
  4. Establish rapport. Let them know they can approach you if problems manifest. Let them see you as a human being.
  5. Reveal something about yourself. This point was contested in my discussion group mentioned above, but I think it is a very important one. Get your students to see you as a person with interests and dedicated to the subject. I like to talk about what led me to stand in front of them – why I got interested in the topic, how I pursued that interest, what interesting things happened along the way.
  6. Establish your own credibility. For me, this is strongly linked to the previous point. As you talk about your own path, students learn about previous positions you held, achievements, research cruises, all those things that establish your own credibility.
  7. Establish the “climate” for the class. This ties back to earlier points, too. You should know what kind of climate you want in your class: Will it be relaxed or intense? Funny or serious? Personal or distant? By starting out your course in a certain climate, it is easier to ensure that this is the climate that will dominate the class for the rest of the semester, than trying to change climate once you’ve got going.
  8. Provide administrative information. This is kind of a no-brainer – after all, this is what most first classes are all about. What are the requirements? Deadlines? Formats? Where is your office, what are your contact details, this kind of thing.
  9. Introduce the subject matter. This is a point I feel strongly about: No matter how good a job you do on all the other points: You need to get going with content right from the start, or, in line with what I wrote above about setting the tone, nobody will expect that this class is actually about content if you only talk about admin info during all of the first class.

The document closes with a final note:

“Remember that it is imperative that you do on the first day whatever it is you want the class to do the rest of the semester. If you want them to discuss, discuss on the first day. If you want them to work in small groups, find something for them to do in small groups on the first day.”

Asking students to tell us about “the muddiest point”

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Getting feedback on what was least clear in a course session.

A classroom assessment technique that I like a lot is “the muddiest point”. It is very simple: At the end of a course unit, you hand out small pieces of papers and ask students to write down the single most confusing point (or the three least clear points, or whatever you chose). You then collect the notes and go through them in preparation for the next class.

This technique can also be combined with classical minute papers, for example, or with asking students to write down the take-home message they are taking away from that teaching unit. It is nice though if take-home messages actually remain with the students to literally take home, rather than being collected by the instructor.

But give it a try – sometimes it is really surprising to see what students take home from a lesson: It might not be what you thought was the main message! Often they find anecdotes much more telling than all the other important things you thought you had conveyed so beautifully. And then the muddiest points are also really helpful to make sure you focus your energy on topics that students really need help with.