Do students dream of electric beeps?

These lovely experimental philosophers (not to be confused with scientists) have been known to set a device that emits electronic beeps at random intervals during their academic talks.  After a beep, they randomly poll audience members about what was going on in their 'last undisturbed moment of inner experience before the beep'.

The 'representative' results discussed are predictable for anyone who has ever been to any kind of academic gathering: 1 out of 6 are thinking (or 'experiencing') anything at all about the content of the talk, and that solitary person is 'feeling confused'.

I think this is probably also true of most undergraduate lectures, and I need to remind myself of that whenever I am tempted to become a gesticulating, monologue-ing, talking head.  I might be experiencing great intellectual engagement when I present my thoughtful arguments to an audience, but they are more likely to be experiencing the "feeling of tiredness; maybe feeling tingling on tooth from permanent retainer."

Podcast on Scientific Teaching

Jo Handelsman was interviewed by Nature Education (Scitable) last week.  Want to know what scientific teaching is? Listen up.

Learning Objectives

As I alluded to before, my students took quite some time to understand how important the learning objectives for my module were.

Please read this primer on learning objectives if you have not been initiated into their importance; they declare, both to our students and to ourselves, what it is that we want them to learn, and what they should be able to do to prove they have.  The goal of our course structures is alignment of our learning objectives with the activities (which help students achieve those objectives) and with the assessments (which test whether students have achieved those objectives).

I opened my module with a 10-minute lecture on what to expect and how learning objectives work and how I would not cover every single concept and example from the text book and that they could use the learning objectives (and my assigned reading pages!) to decide which bits to read and which to ignore.

After every single class (and in many emails) I got the same question:  "You're not covering everything in the textbook?  How on earth will I know which bits are important for the exam?"

I always responded in the same way, and re-iterated my entreaties to use the learning objectives in class.  Finally, by the fourth class, I was fed up, and tried something new.  I had been putting all of the objectives for the day in a list and presenting them at the beginning, and then again at the end.  It seemed like at the beginning, students didn't know what the objectives were about, and just wanted to get started, and at the end their appearance was a cue to start packing up. 

So instead, before each individual activity I presented the relevant objective and slowly stated something to the effect of: "This...is...what...I...will...expect...you...to...be...able...to...do...in...your...exam...on...Monday." 

I think that this had the desired (possibly short-term?) effect.  My plan for next time is to stick with the individual objective method (sans the slow talking) but also to explicitly introduce the principle of 'alignment' and to present several example exam questions paired with the objective they assess.  Hopefully that works better.

The dreaded Student Evaluations and the elusive Buy-in

 I felt as nervous to start reading my 228 student evaluations as I did walking into the first day of class hugging a gigantic cardboard box full of candy.  I know, I know, evaluation is what I need and want, and even asked for (with participation points as an encouragement), but it still made me queasy, and I put it off for days.

 The reason I was so nervous was that I had heard, over and over again, that students are often hostile towards active learning classes, particularly when there is no opportunity to pre-emptively explore the method-behind-the-madness and encourage student buy-in.  Buy-in is not only desirable for your ego (and evaluation scores), but necessary for the students' successful engagement with the techniques.  Unfortunately, the most time-efficient method of encouraging buy-in, which is the  PR approach of simply stating that the methods you use are the greatest ever and proven by scientists in white coats, is likely to be the least effective way of converting your students to enthusiastic active learners.  For the approved, student-centred exemplar, check out this article from the otherwise subscription-only National Teaching and Learning Forum.

Anyway, as excited as I am by that idea, in practice I only had 10 minutes in my four-class module dedicated to 'encouraging buy-in'.  I spent 99% of that time trying to explain as clearly as possible how the structure of my module would differ from the rest of the course, what was expected of them and how to use the learning objectives.  Not that many of them believed me (more on that in my next post).  So no buy-in was achieved.  Hence my nervousness at their reactions to my module.  Many students liked me, or liked my methods, or liked the class or the examples or the objectives or this, that, or the other, but by far the most common response was :

1) The method was 'inefficient'.
That is, we didn't cover enough.

2) Depending on the student complaining, being called on to report out was either intimidating or 'pointless'. 
In explanation, my method to make sure that people actually engaged in the activities (since no marks were available) was to call on people at random to report out the results of their group discussions.  In passing, several students made it clear in their evaluations that this had worked, by stating that they wouldn't have bothered doing any of the activities if not for the fear of being called out.  But they overwhelmingly hated the idea.

3) Group work and discussion based learning was inappropriate for such a big class.

How I dealt with my bad student evaluations.
The most obvious method for dealing with bad evaluations is not to get them.  To try the buy-in activities. To be organised and make sure the students know what to expect.  To accept that much of the criticism might be valid and look for ways to improve your work.  But the reality is that bad student evaluations could persist anyway.  And that can really, really matter for a tertiary teaching career.  Rightly or wrongly (please read this eloquent diatribe for the 'wrongly' argument) student evaluations are often the information that employers use to assess your effectiveness as a teacher.  The answer that our FIRST IV mentors have given us is (to paraphrase) SHOW THEM THE DATA.  Make sure that you collect good data on learning gains in your classes. Be able to demonstrate that your students are meeting their learning objectives, even if they whine that group work is annoying.  

On this note, I'd like to explain how I regained my cheeriness after reading hundreds of student evaluations complaining about the inefficiency of my methods.  I read their post-instruction 'dinosaur essays'.