Author: guest

Can’t get your students to do the readings before class? If your course has exams, here’s a sure-fire method that will have them hitting the books and not only reading but reading strategically.

On the first meeting of the term, give each student a pack of 3X5 cards, one for each class meeting of the term. (Or have them buy their own, depending on your budget and the class size.) Explain to them that each class they will be permitted to turn in one card inscribed with their name, the date, and notes about the day’s reading. Further, they must hand the card in before class so that their notes are drawn entirely from their reading of the text, and not from the lecture or class activities. Further explain that you will return to each student their bundle of cards at the beginning of their midterm/final and that they may use their cards to help answer exam questions.

With this method, you are essentially letting the students write their own customized books for an open-book exam, but stipulating that the material for the book must be drawn from the course readings. It will take very little persuading for students to see the benefits of having a pack of customized notes at their elbow come exam time. What might take a little more effort is training students to make good choices about which parts of the readings they ought to record on their cards.

The great thing is, though, that you’ll be in a better position to support the development of their active reading skills because you’ll be able to go over their cards and see what they’re gleaning from each reading. Indeed, you may wish to start each class by quickly skimming a random selection of the cards for that class and discussing with students the highs and lows of their reportage.

I’ve used this method with a first-year class with about 80 students. The overwhelming majority of students submitted cards in each class, and most of them contained useful content about the readings. The fact that the students had all done the readings meant that lots of students participated in class discussions, and the quality of those discussions improved. Additionally, students become practiced at reading before class and at making reading notes. You as an instructor are better informed about how your students are doing with the readings, and can adapt your teaching in light of this.

And the downsides? Well, you’ll need to make time after each class to skim through the cards to make sure that students have actually written about that day’s reading (rather than sneakily revising their notes about the previous reading). The biggest challenge, though, is sorting all of the cards. I once foolishly left the sorting until the end of term and was forced to spend a back-aching day hunched over piles of cards arrayed on my office floor. Don’t do that.

Overall though, even if sorting the cards is a pain, it’s a small price to pay for starting each class with a room full of students who have done the readings and jotted down some initial notes about them. Now if only you could get them to bring you coffee…

Note: I’ll bet this method was somebody else’s idea. I talk teaching with lots of colleagues and we often trade ideas. Sometimes it’s hard to remember which ideas are mine and which are borrowed. I cannot for the life of me remember who came up with this brilliant method. If it was you, let me know and I’ll adapt this post so that you get credit for the idea. (And if it actually was me, yay me!)

Shannon Dea teaches in the Department of Philosophy, and is a Teaching Fellow for the Faculty of Arts.

Image courtesy of ccarlstead.

Sometimes, great teaching and learning solutions are right at our fingertips.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching a winter term night course. It was mid-way through the term and the students were clearly exhausted. My usually participatory class clammed up, and I had to do something.

I stopped “delivering lectures” per se years ago. As I’ve grown into my teaching, I’ve become less and less concerned about transmitting content, and much more interested in helping my students to engage with the material sufficiently that they’ll be motivated to seek out the content on their own. So, nowadays, I’m more of a facilitator or master of ceremonies than a lecturer. I don’t tell my students what the readings say; they tell me. And, as they do so, they tell me what’s plausible about the positions we’re considering and what requires a more critical response.

I’ve developed a bunch of different methods to encourage students to participate in class discussions, but that night nothing was working. My mind raced as I struggled to think of a way to kickstart the conversation. And, then it clicked.

I grabbed my wool mittens from my coat pockets, turned them inside-out into a soft ball and told my students, “Ok. Time for a mitten ball debate.”

I wrote a controversial statement related to that week’s material on the board. Then, I drew an imaginary line down the middle of the lecture hall and told the students that everyone left of the line was on the “Pro” side and everyone right of the line was on the “Con” side.  I gave them a few minutes to gather their thoughts and jot them down before elaborating the rules of the game:

• The only person permitted to speak is the person holding the mitten ball.
• Speakers must make new points, not repeat those points other speakers have already made.
• No one may hold the mitten ball more than once.
• After one has finished speaking, s/he must toss the mitten ball to someone on the other side of the lecture hall (and, hence, on the other side of the debate).
• If you catch the mitten ball and have nothing to say, you may toss it to someone else on your side who has not yet participated.
• Whichever team runs out of novel comments first loses. (Or, more constructively, whichever team doesn’t run out of points wins.)

I closed my eyes and tossed the ball toward the students.

And it worked. The discussion that followed was energetic and engaging. And, in the remaining weeks of the term, the students themselves several times requested mitten ball debates. There were several mentions of the mitten ball on student evaluations of the course, including such pseudo-koans as “Trust the mitten ball.”

So, what is it about mitten ball debates that students like? I’m still working it through, but here are a few of my ideas about this:

• It’s fun to throw things. Moreover, having to follow a projectile with one’s eyes, to throw and to catch, pulls students out of the “alpha state” they so often slip into in three-hour classes. Just that little bit of physicality can make a huge cognitive difference.
• Mitten ball debates involve everyone, not just the smartypants who sit in the front row with their hands up all the time. Students too easily fall into patterns about who the speakers are in the class and who the non-speakers are. Mitten ball debating is premised on breaking those patterns. And, students are often grateful when the usual suspects don’t get to weigh in three times on the same point. (The corresponding advantage for instructors is that, in a mitten ball debate, one need never say, “That’s another really great point, Smartypants, but let’s hear what someone else has to say…”)
• Mitten ball debating takes the pressure off to make the best point. Since the game just requires teams to come up with as many points as possible, students are helping their team just as much with comparatively weak points as with strong ones. This means there’s less stigma associated with “saying something stupid.”

There are a few different ways you can run a mitten ball debate. You can, as I did, arbitrarily assign a position to each side of the class. Or, you can allow students to move to whichever side of the class corresponds to their own view. Alternatively, you might ask students to move to whichever side corresponds to the opposite of their own view. Adducing evidence for the opposite side is always a great exercise!

And, of course, there’s nothing saying you have to limit the teams to two. In a Classics class, for example, one could divide the class in three and have a mitten ball debate about the comparative merits of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Crassus.

When I’ve held mitten ball debates, inevitably, some students colour outside of the lines – either “crossing the floor” once they become persuaded of their opponents’ position, or remaining where they are but shouting suggestions to the opposite side when they notice an argument the other team has neglected.

Fine by me. After all, the point of a mitten ball debate isn’t to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules, but to warm students up to a topic that at first leaves them cold. I suppose it should come as no surprise that, even in the depths of the winter term, mittens help to provide a little warmth.

Have your own ideas about why mitten balls work? Or, tips to share about cool teaching and learning solutions you figured out on the fly? Log in below to comment, or email me at sjdea at uwaterloo dot ca.

Shannon Dea is currently the Teaching Fellow for the Faculty of Arts. This blog post originally appeared on the Arts Teaching Fellow Blog. 

I’m a firm believer that a calendar year cannot be concluded without a slew of top 10 lists. Even Faculty Focus, an online website and e-newsletter dedicated to teaching in higher education, recently succumbed to the temptation of a top 10 of 2010. The two-part article entitled “Top 10 Faculty Focus Articles for 2010” Continue reading Good Teaching: The Top 10 Requirements — Michael Pyne