Class Time Reconsidered at the Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning

Sunday night, I delivered the opening keynote at Central Michigan University’s Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning. My presentation was titled “Class Time Reconsidered: Motivating Student Participation and Engagement.” My goal was to share some frameworks and strategies for engaging students in the classroom by taking a few common assumptions about teaching and learning and flipping them on their heads. Here’s my Prezi, complete with much flipping of things on their heads:

Class Time Reconsidered (GLCTL) on Prezi

Some thoughts on the presentation:

One of my first clicker questions asked participants to identify a key challenge in motivating students to engage meaningfully during class. Strangely, the even-numbered answer choices were by far the most popular-students are hesitant to speak up in front of their peers, students focus too much on grades and not enough on learning, and students don’t prepare adequately for class. These results worked well for me, since I had been planning on addressing ways to reach students who are risk-averse or grade-focused and ways to motivate students to prepare for class in useful ways.

Participants engaged in a Think-Pair-Share activity in which they tried to identify six steps in a typical process their students might undertake to learn in their course. This followed an introduction to the idea of a “time for telling,” so I asked participants to make sure that “telling” wasn’t the first step on their lists. I also encouraged participants to force themselves to come up with six steps. Coming up with three-step plans (take notes during class, figure things out in the homework, regurgitate on exams) is too easy. Identifying a six-step process means you have think a little more intentionally about how your students learn.

Given the clicker question results indicating that lack of student preparation is a big challenge, we camped out for a while on the idea of a pre-class assignment. I made two important points about these assignments: they should be graded, if only on effort, so that students will take them seriously and you should make use of these assignments in some way during class. Otherwise students will see them as busywork, not connected with the “real” work of the course. One participant shared her approach-she has students create outlines of their pre-class readings, then share and compare their outlines in small groups during class.

Monday morning (the day after my presentation), I saw on the book raffle table that there’s a new book on Just-in-Time Teaching, Just in Time Teaching: Across the Disciplines and Across the Academy, edited by Scott Simkins and Mark Maier (Stylus, 2010). I wish I had known that Sunday night-I would have mentioned it during that section of my presentation!

My third and final clicker question asked participants to identify one of five in-class engagement strategies they wanted to try soon. While I wasn’t intending the presentation as a pitch for clickers, perhaps my biases couldn’t be hidden-clickers was the number one answer! This result might have also been because clickers are new and different, but not so different as to require a complete rethinking of one’s teaching approach. I’m convinced that the return on investment for teaching with clickers is high-one can make small changes in one’s teaching methods that yield significant results.

At the end of the presentation, I had the participants generate questions for me at their tables. Most of the tables had at least one person with a Web-enabled device (such as the iPads several of the CMU staff hosting the event were sporting). They used these to submit their tables’ questions via Google Moderator. I asked them to vote on other tables’ questions, as well, providing me with a ranked list of the most popular questions. This served as a reasonable demo of Google Moderator as a backchannel tool, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to address the questions that emerged through this process. My plan is to address the more popular questions with Google Moderator since, as the creator of this Moderator session, I can leave comments on individual questions. You can see the questions submitted by the group here.

The conference continues through Tuesday morning. I was able to attend most of the conference on Monday, and I live-tweeted a couple of the sessions. You can read my tweets here. Joy Mighty of Queen’s University in Ontario delivered the Monday lunch keynote, and she made a strong case that by not paying attention to matters of diversity in our classroom, we run the risk of fostering inequity. It was a thought-provoking keynote for me.

Thanks to Central Michigan University for having me as part of their conference and for some great conversations about student engagement!

Eddie Morgan says:

May 25, 2010 at 10:18 am

Looking forward to wathing this presentation later.

Fernando says:

June 2, 2010 at 3:53 pm

Dear Derek,

Your Prezi presentation looks great. Congratulations on the good job. Do you think Prezi presentations could also be useful for a normal lecture? Or do you think they probably only useful for keynotes or similar events, and wouldn’t be helpful for students?

I have never used clickers, but I hope to use them in the future. Are they easy to integrate with Prezi, or is it better to use Powerpoint?

Thanks for your help, and for your very interesting posts.

Fernando

derekbruff says:

June 3, 2010 at 9:09 am

Hi Fernando,

Thanks for the comment. I think Prezi has real potential for “regular” class lectures. One reason is that it allows you to organize ideas spatially in just about any way you like. I find this very helpful for putting together a presentation, since I can throw a bunch of words and images on the Prezi canvas, and then organize them into something coherent as I make sense of them.

This ability to organize ideas spatially also means that you’re in good shape if you decide to change how you want to talk about the material on-the-fly during class. Since you can go “off path” in Prezi anytime you like and zoom around your presentation, if your ideas are organized in a sensible way, it’s really easy to move to different ideas in response to student questions or discussion.

For that reason, you might say Prezi is even better for a regular class session than for a keynote since interacting with students and responding to student discussion is perhaps *more* important in class than it is in a keynote talk. I like to have fairly interactive keynotes, but at least with a keynote I usually have an audience full of people interested in what I have to say. That’s not always true in class!

Derek

June 3, 2010 at 9:40 am

Hi Derek,

Many thanks. This was really useful. The problem was that I don’t understand well how Prezi works, but having this flexibility is really great. I will have to try Prezi soon to see what I can make of it.

By the way, this led me to another problem. Usually students like to have the presentation slides in paper with them, to make notes, etc. Maybe this is not the best practice, and maybe they should spend less times taking notes and more time trying to understand the subject… but, assuming this is not too bad, when you use Prezi in your lectures, do you also give them extra notes? With ppt we only need to give them the slides, but with Prezi it would be harder, I guess. What do you advise me to do in this situation?

Again, many thanks for your help and your very clear explanations.

Cheers,

Going Nonlinear in PowerPoint, Agile Teaching, and CYOA says:

September 2, 2010 at 6:04 pm

[…] that also included clicker questions, such as this talk at the University of Louisville and this one at Central Michigan University. In both cases, I simply embedded my clicker questions in the Prezi (in a particularly clever way […]

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