Expanding Learning – through Conversation – in Our Classes

Dan Perlman/Brandeis University

Draft as of 8/26/13

I have come to believe that learning takes place through conversation, by which I mean in-depth discussion and wrestling with ideas. Conversation may take various forms – between teachers and students, among students, or within a student’s mind while listening to the teacher or reading – but I believe that for students to learn, there must be conversation going on. Without such conversation, anything the teacher says (or the author writes) quickly dissipates, leaving the student with very little.

In this document I will introduce you to three teaching techniques that in my experience greatly increase the amount of conversation going on in the classroom, resulting in increased student learning. These are: Just-in-Time-Teaching, the Question Formulation Technique, and Learning Catalytics. First, though, a bit more about conversation and learning, beginning with examples:

Location / Effective Conversation / Not-so-effective conversation
Seminar / Professor and students speak and listen carefully to each other, responding to others’ comments. If the students actively grapple with ideas, then this is true conversation in the educational sense. / Professor and students speak, but listening and responding are rare. Attempts to score points occur frequently, but there is little wrestling with ideas. This may look like a educational conversation, but it is not an effective one.
Lecture / The guest speaker at a departmental colloquium may be the only person in the room who talks for 50 minutes, but professors and graduate students in the audience are constantly engaging the speaker with questions and conversation in their own minds. It may not appear as if conversation is taking place (there is only one speaker, so how can there be conversation?), yet many rich conversations can go on simultaneously. / An uninspiring introductory lecture delivered to hundreds of students looks much like the departmental colloquium – one person speaks and many listen – yet if we could listen in on the students’ minds, we would hear few conversations and find little learning occurring.
Public Speeches / A master orator (e.g., Bill Clinton) can drag listeners by the scruff of the neck into full-blown conversation, whether it takes place in their own minds or out loud, with shouted responses, cheers, clapping, laughter. I suspect that many people listening to Clinton at the 2012 Democratic Convention learned a lot and came away changed. / As with a classroom lecturer, a public speaker who sees his or her job as being a transmitter of information will probably not engage the audience in conversation; as a result listeners will learn little.

The outward similarity between a departmental colloquium and an introductory lecture class may be one reason why so many professors cling to lecturing as a mode of teaching: they themselves have been learning effectively by sitting and listening to lecturers since their graduate school days. In fact, most of these self-selected elite learners and thinkers succeeded in school all their lives and probably learned to hold effective internal conversations in college or even high school.

Without conversation of the type described above, lectures merely serve as an efficient way to transfer information directly from the professor’s notes to the students’ notes without passing through any active brain matter (apologies to whomever I am paraphrasing). I suspect that many students in introductory classes do not yet know how to engage in internal conversations with the professor, nor do professors invite students into conversation. As a result, students learn little.

In short, conversation is essential – and can take many forms. There are several simple ways to increase the amount of conversation going on in our courses, even the largest classes:

·  Question and answer with the whole class (professor asks and one student answers)

·  Students break into small groups to discuss a topic briefly, followed by a whole class discussion in which many students speak. This includes Think-Pair-Share (the professor asks a question, each student thinks about it for a minute or so, pairs with another student to share ideas, then the whole class discusses some of the ideas), and the Peer Instruction and “clickers” audience response methods developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard.

·  Conversation can also take place in writing. If students write drafts of papers and receive thoughtful comments from the professor then submit revised final versions of the same paper, conversation is occurring. Short self-reflective writing assignments can also be very effective at engaging students in conversation.

Other ways to increase conversation

I have recently begun using three different techniques that have vastly increased the quantity and quality of conversation that goes on in my courses. Taken together, they not only increase conversation between my students and me, but they also increase conversations among my students, and most importantly, they increase the conversations that students have in their minds. My students state strongly that these techniques – described below – have very positive effects on their learning.

“Just-in-Time-Teaching”

Just-in-Time-Teaching has fundamentally changed my teaching practice – and I am confident that it fundamentally changes my students’ learning. In this method students are not merely asked to do the reading before class but they are expected to do the reading – and to respond to a few questions based on the reading – prior to class. They submit their responses electronically at least 18-24 hours before the class, and the professor uses these responses as input for the upcoming session. As a result, the professor enters the classroom with a great deal of insight about what the students do and do not understand and what they find intriguing. My students report (anonymously) that under this method they do the reading much more frequently and more deeply, and that they are better able to take part in classroom discussions. One of the developers of the technique describes it well here: http://webphysics.iupui.edu/jitt/what.html.

Several different types of responses exist:

·  Multiple choice questions, which are easy for the professor to apprehend quickly (this is the traditional Physics style, where this method originated, and it is very effective at uncovering misconceptions)

·  General purpose open-ended questions (e.g., What did you find most confusing in the reading? What did you find most interesting?) – these are excellent defaults that I use regularly and they yield surprisingly rich responses

·  Open-ended questions tailored to specific issues in the reading (these are very powerful).

For each class session I typically select 3-5 student comments that are especially fruitful and project these on the screen as discussion-starters at various points throughout class. The comments may propose intriguing directions for discussion or raise conceptual problems that several students encountered; sometimes I put two opposing views up on the screen to launch a discussion. The allows me to know who is submitting each response, but I project them anonymously when sharing them with the class.

Several distinct benefits emerge from Just-in-Time-Teaching:

·  Students are proud to see their thoughts shared with the entire class (even if their names are not publicly associated with the comments)

·  Students are relieved that the difficulties they had with the reading are shared by others.

·  Quieter students contribute fully, so that their voices become part of the classroom conversation (and sometimes I gently call on them in class to share their thoughts, which they have already articulated in their responses)

·  Because all of the students contribute to the conversation, not just the usual suspects, the classroom dynamic changes significantly and for the better.

My students and I call these brief notes “Thoughts and Questions” or “TQs.” Not only is “TQ” more euphonious than “JiTT,” but the very name – “Thoughts and Questions” – places the locus of control with the student instead of the professor. Here are some comments that my students have made about TQs:

When we first got them, I felt they were a little high school: ‘I gotta make sure you did the reading so here’s a question.’ Then I saw how much it helped me in discussion because I went in there with something in mind. The in-class discussion was much more colorful or active. I ended up really liking them. – Animal Behavior Student, 2011

At first, my TQ responses were vague and less specific or significant. But over time, especially by your display of other students’ TQs, I learned how to read better -- with more intention and quest for knowledge beyond the surface. It’s a great way to help us analyze the readings, instead of just “doing” them, and I really like that the deadlines are the evening before the class. I’m very excited that we are making them public. It provides a new sort of class forum. – Ecology Student, 2012

Here is a TQ submission on “what was confusing in the readings” from a first-year student in my upper-level Ecology class. Note that she is not merely “doing the reading” – she also tries out possible responses to her queries and proposes them as further questions in her TQ. We can see her actively engaging in an internal conversation as she wrestles with the concepts:

On p.191, there is a quick example of stable equilibrium without oscillation showing a predator whose density decreases as its prey’s density increases. What are possible causes of this? Does equilibrium suit the environment’s available resources, and a large predator population is selected against?

Why don’t predators have hump-shaped isoclines too? The orange/yellow diagram on p.193 (Fig. 11.14b). There must be a point where, even if there is enough prey to go around, there are too many predators (like the book said, territorial behavior and breeding spaces, etc., are limiting factors).

What might explain the hypotheses that generalist predators tend to cause stability and specialists tend to cause instability? Is it about more/less influence over one specific species’ population?

Notes on the TQ process, as I use it:

·  TQs are not graded on quality; if a student submits a certain number of thoughtful TQs during the semester, she gets full credit for 5-10% of their final grade, although many students choose to submit more TQs.

·  Students submit their TQ responses via a Google form that my TAs and I create for each class. Google forms are an excellent means for collecting input from many people, as the form places all of the individual entries into a single downloadable spreadsheet.

·  In larger classes (40+ students) students write a TQ every other class (I typically ask them to submit 10 TQs for the semester in courses that meet twice/week).

·  I do not give individual written feedback on the TQs, although if one is especially intriguing (or worrying) I will reach out to the student.

·  If there is a TA, she reviews the TQs before I see them, highlighting common trouble spots and especially interesting comments (this helps with quick turnaround!).

·  Late in the semester I may give students the option of sharing their TQs with the rest of the class, and students often start responding to others’ comments in their own TQs.

·  Conversely, if we are discussing a very sensitive topic, students may submit their work anonymously, so that they can speak their mind without censoring their comments.

TQs offer a channel through which students can be very honest, which sometimes leads to surprising comments. As these notes are not graded, students can respond to the reading however they see fit, and their occasional flights of fancy or angry rants give insight into students’ thinking that a professor could never get through class discussion (which is too public for such expressions) or papers and tests (which carry the implied cost of a lowered grade).

I frequently feel humbled by the quality and honesty of my students’ thoughts in these TQs. At times I find myself thinking that I cannot possibly do justice to all the ideas they share with me – but TQs clearly help my students (and me) learn much more.

Learning Catalytics

Learning Catalytics is a Web-based classroom response system in which the professor poses a question and every student submits a response electronically on smart phones, tablets, or laptops.[1] It is similar in form to classroom response systems such as classroom “clickers” and PollAnywhere – but vastly more powerful. The professor can create any of twenty different types of questions, each of which requires a different type of answer. These include (among others):

·  Sketches (e.g., on a map or graph)

·  Individual words that get assembled into a class-wide word cloud

·  Long text responses

·  Highlighting key phrases in a passage

·  Mathematical statements

·  Ranked choices

·  Multiple-choice questions

Sketches are by far my favorite type of question, as students must actively think to respond, and their sketch clearly reveals their thinking and understanding. Sketches can be displayed individually or overlaid to create a composite picture of the responses of the entire class.

The text responses can be also very fruitful. I sometimes use these to ask my students to summarize a paper or a topic by writing a haiku poem – and we share these via Learning Catalytics. This is great mental discipline, as the students must identify and articulate the essence of a complex topic in just a few words – and the students greatly enjoy the challenge.