Hello Y’all,
1: Thank you for all the well wishes. We turned the corner yesterday and seem to be feeling much better. *Fingers Crossed*
2: I wrote today’s post before the crisis and it is just hanging out in my story folder. Thought you might enjoy this. Nathalie Zarisfi gave me the idea for it. Enjoy.
At conferences, I keep hearing the mantra to be continuously measuring what I do in my classroom. I do, and am in full support of it. We all should. But here is where I make a break from the education research community. If you are teaching a class and not planning on publishing your teaching, you do not have to do a deliberate, thorough and exhaustive study. Get the data as fast as you can and make a course correction based on that data. As practitioners, we must digest what we are hearing from the educational community and use it to change for the better. But we don’t all need to become education researchers to be wildly successful at teaching, and to successfully use active learning in your classroom, you do not have to turn it into a full-on educational research lab. Just go for it!
What I am arguing is to cut time and exhaustive research out of the classroom. Don’t be afraid to try things out with your students and see where it goes, continuously molding the learning experience through interactive lecture, active learning exercises, discussion, etc. in real time. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and frankly it won’t be the first few times you try. The thing is, we have to continually be trying to make the learning experience better.
Class should ideally be an opportunity to explore, to laugh, and to enjoy the topic that we have to learn. As educators, we need to be nimble. We need to take in information quickly and make creative tactical changes to our class in real time. We need to not forget to connect with our students. The connection is everything. The idea behind this is discussed at length in Harrington’s and Zakrajsek’s recent book titled Dynamic Lecturing. They discuss using interactive lectures with active learning exercises as a means to connect with students.
This isn’t too foreign, right? As an experimental physicist, when I want to learn how something works, I undergo a creative process. I try things out. I play. I am continuously using feedback from the experiment to “explore” what I should look at next. If it’s new to me, I am not 100% sure how it will turn out. I creatively develop a model for how the experiment works and connect it to the data. Once I have the “ah-ha” moment, then I start thinking about doing the deliberate, thorough, and exhaustive experiments needed to publish the science. But if I am not looking to publish (which most practitioners aren’t), the initial model, many times, is enough. If you are not an educational researcher, get the feedback! But don’t worry too hard if it’s not perfect or scientific. Quickly learn and move on.
This is one reason I do not use clickers in my classroom. The technology gets in the way. Yes I can run statistical analysis on my classes’ answers to questions, but there is something lost in the connection by coldly looking at the numbers. Rather, instead, I use old school method of “close your eyes and hold up the number of fingers that corresponds to your answer.” In the early days of active learning, students were given a sheet of paper with four brightly colored squares labeled A, B, C, and D. Students could fold the paper showing the instructor only their answer. Many times a simple, “thumbs up? Thumbs down?” works perfectly. And if I am feeling extra saucy, I might ask the class to give me one middle finger for this answer and two middle fingers for the other answer. Once my class was so excited that they had figured out a difficult topic, they couldn’t contain their enthusiasm and all jumped up out of their seats giving me two middle fingers. I imagine, it was very liberating.
One of the things that a good lecturer can do is drive excitement into learning. I still remember those lecturers who were so good they had me at the edge of their seat, hanging on each word. Employ active learning in your classes, but also look for ways to drive that excitement in your classroom. Connect with your students. The students get so frustrated when a faculty member is coldly following some active learning technique they learned at a conference. Once that frustration hits a tipping point, you have lost the excitement in class. They may do well on their post-test but you have lost that ever-so-important moment to inspire.
I have done some seriously wacky things in the classroom. Every now and again, I’ll will teach a class without talking, sending students to the white board, and play-acting charged particles. Each class, I am asking myself what is the most successful and creative way to get the students to learn. Then I go for it. I don’t worry about any future study; I just use real-time feedback to make sure they are learning. How they do on post-test matters, but we are also creating the scientists and professionals of the future. We have to imprint on them the excitement of whatever course we are teaching. Be a scientist. Take data. Analyze. Be logical. Be an artist too. Explore, play, and be creative.
Leave a Reply