Session on Supporting Faculty Teaching with Clickers

I’m at the POD Network conference in Houston, Texas, today and tomorrow.  The POD Network is my professional organization, consisting of people like me who work at teaching and learning centers.  I’m looking forward to some great sessions while I’m here.  I’m on the official POD Twitter team, so I’ll be tweeting throughout the conference.  You can follow my tweets as well as others coming from the conference by searching for the hashtag #pod09 on Twitter.

I’m facilitating a session Friday morning at 9 on supporting faculty teaching with clickers.  I’ve included the abstract below.  The session was inspired by findings by Freeman et al. (2007) and Fies & Marshall (2008) that instructors new to using clickers tend to use clickers in ways that are consistent with their existing teaching practices and existing beliefs about teaching and learning.  The goal of the session is to explore this question: “Might teaching with clickers help instructors reflect on and change their pedagogical practices instead of merely reinforcing those practices?”

I’ve posted some resources for the session on WikiPODia, the new POD Network wiki, including some handouts I’ll be using during the session that you might find interesting.

Here’s the abstract for the session:

Classroom response systems (“clickers”) allow instructors to rapidly collect and summarize student responses to multiple-choice questions they ask of students during class.  Clickers are growing in popularity among instructors in many disciplines and are quickly becoming mainstream technologies useful for engaging students during class and generating information on student learning for formative assessment and “agile” teaching.  This workshop will explore effective clicker questions and pedagogies in order to understand instructor “learning trajectories” around the use of clickers and thus develop concrete, effective strategies for supporting instructors using clickers in ways that help them reflect on and refine their teaching practices.