Tag Archives: instruction

Thinking about course texts and technologies

After teaching a course designed to introduce students to Shakespeare’s plays and to their film adaptations, I’ve been wondering how reading technologies shape students’ engagement with course materials.  On reflection, the traditional screening format for films or film clips (single focal point, lights off) might implicitly invite students to tune out or change their focus when our classes don’t explicitly discuss the assumptions that we bring when we begin reading or interpreting.

When we used electronic versions of the plays (eBook readers, tablets, and laptops), the change in format seemed to free students from the implicit authority of the printed text and spur conversation.  At the same time, many of my students have talked about how their study habits differ when they work with either electronic or printed course texts.  Some prefer to print even short readings because the medium changes the relationship between the student and the text.

How, then, do embedded video clips within a course management system differ from the same clips shown during a classroom session? How do they differ as modes of educational instruction with their own implicit interpretive maps?

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Asynchronous Questions as Starting Points for Discussion

One pedagogical experiment that I’m taking on this semester is an attempt to draw students into the lecture/discussion more fully by using exploratory questions to invite students to work on a common problem with the instructor.  While it is admittedly somewhat Socratic, beginning with a shared question can help to articulate the purpose of the class session and motivate students to think about the underlying intellectual issues that this problem engages.  For classes that tend to be relatively pragmatic, this kind of starting point seems to provide a more concrete analog for discussion at a more theoretical level.

Teachers can pose these initial, exploratory questions to the class directly, or they might pose them rhetorically and articulate the stakes before inviting student input.  According to What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain (Harvard UP, 2004), these questions “confront students with a common problem (of understanding, application, analysis, or synthesis)” and help to explain its broader significance.  In a larger class, however, this can lead to a few students frequently dominating the conversation if other students feel less comfortable speaking publicly about new ideas.  I’ve tried a number of strategies to try to invite more of the class into the conversation.

The first strategy is requiring that students complete a course journal or discussion board question on the topics to be discussed in class.  Gathering these responses before class allows me to see what students throughout the class are thinking, and calling on students based on their ‘published’ written work does not put them on the spot in the same way that asking them to respond to a question or idea for the first time might do.  A second option, which I’m trying this semester for the first time, is to use in-class polling.  Many campuses still have “clickers” for this purpose, and smaller classes can use the resources at PollEverywhere to have students answer with their phones or computers.  Students can see the breakdown of results immediately, and the distribution of responses (particularly to more open-ended questions) can be provocative.  In a sense, students can see how many other students in the class share their opinion in real time, which might inspire confidence in students less likely to speak on their own or might encourage students with different opinions challenge the prevailing assumptions.

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

For those of us interested in what Sterne calls “large lecture pedagogy,” this post from ProfHacker covers some of the best practices for large sections in humanities classrooms that can mitigate some of the potential shortcomings of the multiple-choice test.  The comment on clickers resonates with my experiences as a student and an instructor, but I have seen them used in more illuminating ways from time to time.  Ultimately, what may be the biggest challenge related to the multiple-choice format of assessment is the fact that the instructor cannot fully control the way in which students approach the exam–through the lens of their previous experiences with this kind of assessment.  The genre of the ‘test’  can encourage students to draw upon either positive or negative habits of thought developed in their earlier educational experiences.

Social Media and the Classroom

Social Media and the Classroom

From Forbes magazine – an instructor at Temple University talks about using social media in the classroom as a way of engaging students twice with the same material. While the article offers some great starting points and can provoke some useful discussion among the technophiles and curmudgeons, I think that Shapiro might have emphasizes more strongly the underlying point that harnessing these existing technologies means educating students about the potential benefits and limitations of these technologies.  He points to this explicitly when talking about Twitter, but changes to the traditional curriculum–such as hybrid or online courses–means asking students to think critically about their existing use of technology and meeting them at widely varying levels of familiarity and technological fluency.