Back in May 2010, I led a webinar on teaching with clickers as part of the CIRTLcast series for the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), an NSF-sponsored network of six universities interested in preparing future science, engineering, and mathematics faculty. The full webinar was 60 minutes, and you can access the audio recording and my slides in the CIRTLcast archive. However, CIRTL has done a great job taking some excerpts from the session and packaging them as a 10-minute YouTube video, complete with a transcript!

In the video, you’ll hear me talk about using clickers to generate small-group and classwide discussion, create “times for telling,” encourage metacognition, facilitate peer assessment, structure class time, turn quizzes into learning experiences, and make class more fun. Clickers can be used very effectively to engage students in the learning process during class, and this short video is a nice introduction to these uses of clickers.

Thanks to CIRTL for giving me the opportunity to present this webinar and for putting together this great video!

Reference: Webking, R., & Valenzuela, F. (2006). Using audience response systems to develop critical thinking. In Banks, David A. (Ed.), Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.

Summary: Webking and Valenzuela describe ways they use classroom response systems in their political sciences courses at the University of Texas-El Paso to foster critical thinking through active participation and class discussions. After noting some commonly cited advantages of teaching with clickers—easier attendance and participation record-keeping, greater participation through anonymity and accountability, and the collection of data to inform agile teaching decisions—the authors provide several concrete examples of clicker questions they have found valuable for developing their students’ critical thinking skills.

The authors’ first example is a sequence of clicker questions that serve to guide students through a close reading of a few passages in the play Antigone. At one point in the play, Antigone makes a statement that seems to very clearly express her belief that obedience to the gods trumps obedience to the king. At another point, however, she makes a somewhat cryptic statement that calls this previous assertion into question. Webking and Valenzuela start with an understand-level question that asks students to clarify this second statement. They follow this with an application-level question asking students to identify a logical consequence of her cryptic statement, one which seems to run counter to her earlier statement about serving the gods. Their third question is an analysis-level one, and it asks students to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements by Antigone by identifying a hidden motivation of hers that makes her statements consistent.

Webking and Valenzuela also describe how they use a particularly challenging, analysis-level question about Plato’s Euthyphro. The question asks students to identify the central argument of a particular passage, one that deals with the relationship between justice and piousness. The question is one that Jean McGivney-Burelle would call a “horizontal question” since students answering the question are typically split evenly among three answer choices. Webking and Valenzuela note that one of the three popular responses can’t be supported by the text. Students who argue for this answer choice quickly realize that they were projecting their own perspectives on the text, not arguing from the text. This is a useful metacognitive moment for these students. The class discussion then focuses on the remaining two popular answer choices. Making sense of these two choices requires the students to grapple with categorical logic, the kind that is well-represented by Venn diagrams. Once the students have discussed their way to the correct answer, they realize the value of categorical logic in making sense of arguments like the ones Plato makes—another metacognitive moment.

The Plato example comes from one of the authors’ smaller, upper-level courses, and they assert that “it is in a smaller class that the [classroom response] system is at its best in encouraging discussion and precise argument.” They reach this conclusion, in part, because of the ability of their classroom response system to report to the instructor individual student responses to clicker questions as those responses are submitted. The authors use these individual, real-time results to guide their post-vote discussions, focusing on “groups which had difficulties in reaching consensus, students or groups which answered particularly quickly or particularly slowly, students who disagreed with their groups, students who changed their minds, and so on.” They argue that the ability to see individual, real-time results is important in leading effective post-vote discussions since it allows instructors to analyze “each student’s rational odyssey with each question.”

Also in the article are two examples of student perspective questions the authors use to motivate particular topics in their courses. In one example, they ask students to identify questions they aren’t likely to ask someone they’ve just met. Invariably, students identify the questions about religion and politics. The authors point out to students that one reasonable conclusion from this is that religion and politics are the least important things to know about when getting to know someone. This motivates students to want to learn why this social phenomenon exists.

Comments: This would be a great article to give a faculty member in political science or philosophy who’s interested in getting started teaching with clickers. Webking and Valenzuela provide a concrete, interesting example of a guided close reading of a text (Antigone) using clicker questions of increasing difficulty. This is a great model for instructors in the humanities and social sciences interested in helping their students develop critical thinking and close reading skills. I wish, however, that they had included some voting data in this example and had discussed how they use the results of these questions to guide discussions, as they did with their Plato example.

The Plato example is a great model of clicker use in text-based courses, too. One reason is that the approach Webking and Valenzuela use leads students to appreciate the nature of argument in their discipline. They write, “In time, and actually not very much time, students learn to care more about the strength of the argument than about having their initial position defended as right.” The authors present a useful list of options for leading these kinds of class discussions—focusing on groups that were conflicted, students who answered quickly or slowly, students who changed their minds, etc.

The authors assert that the quality of discussions they can foster depends on the availability to the instructor of real-time, individual voting data. Not all classroom response systems have this feature and, in my experience, instructors who have the option of looking at individual results as they come in don’t frequently take advantage of this option. I think that perhaps the availability of real-time, individual results isn’t as critical as Webking and Valenzuela assert. I’ll often have my students vote on a question individually, then discuss it in groups, then vote again. I’ll sometimes ask for a student who changed his or her mind from the first vote to the second vote to explain his or her reasoning. I can also see asking for a student who disagreed with his or her group to contribute to the post-vote discussion.  (That’s a nice idea, one that I’ll have to try soon!)

My approach, using the aggregate and not individual voting data, relies on students who fit certain profiles volunteering to share their perspectives with the class. Webking and Valenzuela’s approach doesn’t rely on volunteers, but it isn’t quite cold-calling, either, since they select students only after the students have had a chance to consider and respond to the clicker question. I’d like to call this “warm-calling” since the students have had a chance to warm up to the question and since the instructors aren’t calling on students without any knowledge of what those students might contribute to the discussion. I’m not familiar with many instructors who practice warm-calling.  If you do, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about your experiences doing so.

Image: “Coffin Sculpture of Antigone” by Flickr user Xuan Rosamanios / Creative Commons licensed

File this under “Better Late Than Never.”  Back in January 2010, I coordinated (with Kelly Cline and Kien Lim) a contributed paper session on teaching with clickers at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco.  Shortly after the conference, I blogged about some clickers talks that didn’t fall in our session, but I never got around to blogging about the talks in our session!  Five months later, I’m finally getting around to sharing my notes from those talks…

“The Evolution of Classroom Voting in Contemporary Mathematics,” Jean McGivney-Burelle, University of Hartford [PowerPoint Slides]

Jean teaches a “math for the liberal arts” course called Contemporary Mathematics taken by music and arts majors among others.  She finds her students come to the course with relatively little interest or self-reported ability in mathematics, so it’s a tough crowd to teach.  A few years ago, she started teaching with clickers in order to appeal to what she calls the “thumb generation”–students used to spending a lot of time sending text messages.

Jean interspersed some clicker questions throughout her lectures and encouraged students to discuss them in small groups before voting.  She and the students liked this, but she found that most of her questions were answered correctly by most of her students  and that the small group discussions didn’t involve much debate among students.  The next year, Jean decided to ask tougher questions.  She calls them QEDs–Questions to Encourage Discussion.  She aimed for the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

For example, in Jean’s first year using clickers she gave her students a preference schedule–a list of how each voter in an electorate (only four of them to keep things simple) ranked all of the candidates.  She then asked her students to determine which candidate would win the election using the instant run-off voting scheme.  This is a straight-forward application of a particular algorithm.

The next year, Jean asked another question in which she shared a preference schedule with her students and asked them to analyze it.  However, this time, she asked the question at the beginning of the unit on voting schemes and asked her students to indicate which of the candidates had the best case for winning the election.  There’s no single correct answer to this question since winner of an election (well, one involving at least three candidates) depends on what scheme you use to count the votes.  This is a great example of a one-best-answer question (since students are asked to select the one answer they think is best among multiple reasonable answers) used to create a time for telling (since it’s used to make the point that which voting scheme you use matters).

Jean found that these more challenging and ambiguous questions generated longer and more engaged small group discussions as well as more “horizontal” bar graphs–ones indicating significant disagreement among the students.  Looking ahead, she plans to build on this success by writing questions designed to develop mathematical habits of mind–an important goal of this course.  For example, here’s a sample question she shared aimed at pointing students towards the notions of proof and counterexamples:

Suppose there is a majority winner in an election. Will all of the voting methods we have studied thus far always pick that winner?  Yes or no?  If you answer yes, prepare to defend your answer. If you answer no, have a counterexample ready.

I really like this question.  It has a degree of ambiguity that students often find disconcerting, but it also reminds students of how they’ll need to defend their answers, which should help put their minds at ease.  As Jean noted in her talk, in a course like this one, it’s more important students develop mathematical habits of minds (like the ones surfaced by this question) than learn particular math content areas.  I hope this kind of question helps with this objective.

Stay tuned to the blog for more notes on these talks over the coming days…

Image: “Deep Down Inside, We All Love Math” by Flickr user Network Osaka / Creative Commons licensed

Wesley Fryer, on his “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” blog, recently argued that clickers shouldn’t be put in the same basket as laptops or netbooks when it comes to educational technology in the classroom.  He writes:

Personally I am NOT a big fan of clickers. Clickers don’t promote creativity. Clickers don’t empower learners to create and share content, or collaborate. I have been in many classrooms equipped with electronic whiteboards and even clickers, where the ISTE NETS were not being met AT ALL.

There’s a great discussion in the comments below Fryer’s blog post about clickers, faculty development, and active learning.  Fryer has apparently not seen clickers used to foster active learning, but he’s open to hearing ideas.   Here’s what I said about these issues in the comments:

Dean Loberg makes some great points above about the use of clickers as a faculty development tool, giving faculty members an easy way to become more student-centered in their learning. It’s true, as Wesley Fryer points out, that for a few hundred dollars, you can purchase a netbook that replicates the function of a clicker while also allowing a larger set of rich interactions. However, basic clicker models run closer to $25 than $70, so clickers can be cheaper by a factor of 10.

Furthermore, shifting from “stand and deliver” teaching to a mode of teaching that leverages the interactive capabilities of a class full of networks is a big shift in one’s teaching. That shift might not be an easy one or even an appropriate one for all teachers in all teaching contexts. Polling students to gauge their understanding during a lecture makes sense to most instructors used to the “stand and deliver” method. Since clickers are surprisingly flexible instructional tools, instructors who adopt them for use in very limited ways often find more interactive, student-centered ways to use them.

How can clickers be used to foster student creativity and collaboration? I think the key idea here is to think about using clickers to ask questions you wouldn’t put on an exam. Imagine providing students with four or five contribution factors to a particular historical event, then asking them to select the factor that was most significant. This kind of question wouldn’t work on an exam, unless you had an essay question to accompany it in which students justified their answers. However, this is a great clicker question, since it asks each student to evaluate the given options and commit to his or her answer, creating conditions for a fantastic classwide discussion of the question. Having students pair up to discuss their answers before voting adds even more to the collaborative dynamic. And knowing the distribution of student responses to this question gives the instructor useful data for making the discussion more relevant and responsive to the students.

I blog regularly about teaching with clickers. If this topic interests you, you might start with my recent post on using clickers to teach critical thinking.

I’ll add here that instructors who use clickers in rather limited ways (just taking attendance, for instance, or facilitating the grading of quizzes) don’t always find more student-centered ways to use them.  I’ve blogged in the past about the challenge of helping instructors think creatively about their use of clickers.  The fact that Wesley Fryer, who is clearly a creative and enthusiastic proponent of educational technology, hasn’t seen clickers used well reminds me that it continues to be important to share best practices for engaging students with clickers.

Image: “school bag” by Flickr user joe.yeah / Creative Commons licensed

Earlier this month, David Clemens, who teaches literature at Monterey Peninsula College, authored a post titled “The Data-Driven Classroom” on the National Association of Scholars (NAS) blog.  In his satirical post, Clemens he refers to clickers as “the future of edubiz:”

Clickers generate tsunamis of admin’s holy grail—data! With data I can prepare reports and quantify learning to show that I’m accountable.

His post goes on in this tone, satirizing those who use technology for technology’s sake.  (He includes a few shots at the use of PowerPoint and hyperlinked texts.)  I objected to his characterization of clickers as primarily used to generate assessment data for administrators, so I left a couple of comments on the post, arguing that clickers are primarily used to engage students during class, not to generate data for administrators.

David Clemens then wrote a follow-up post, “Reply to Bruff,” on the NAS blog.  In this post, he asserts the following:

Students urgently need unmediated classrooms and Exemplary-level teachers [those who model critical reasoning for students] who through Socratic dialogue and shared inquiry develop independent, informed, and original minds.

He argues that clickers (and PowerPoint and student learning objectives) don’t help teachers meet this goal.  Since I believe they do and that the useful effects of clickers are frequently underestimated in the humanities, I posted a lengthy comment elaborating on my earlier comments on the NAS blog.  You can read Dr. Clemens’ posts by following the links above.  Below you’ll find my response.

On his “Old is the New New” blog, Rob MacDougall recently argued that the question “If a viking and a samurai fought, who would win?” has great potential for helping students learn to think critically.  Here’s why:

Take a counterfactual question–as far as I know, vikings never fought samurai–and have at it. You can enter this debate with any level of starting knowledge, arguing solely from the evidence in the pictures (that samurai looks pretty fierce, but the viking has his buddies with him). Yet there is no bottom to the amount of evidence you could gather or the complexity of the arguments you could marshal on either side. You could talk about military tactics or metalworking technology. You could research the agricultural potential of Scandinavia or the codification of Bushido. You could spin out a whole saga in which a Nihonese armada devastates the Vinlander entrepots at “Perleshavn” and vengeful Norsemen go a-viking into the Inland Sea.

This is a great example of how a simple, multiple-choice question (even one with merely two answers!) can potentially be used to generate rich in-class discussions.  I don’t know if Rob MacDougall has used his vikings vs. samurai question as a clicker question, but just imagine how well it would work as one!  I can see students getting pretty fired up over the results of such a clicker question.  Poll the students, then have them discuss the question as a class, then poll them again to see if they’ve shifted opinions, then discuss further and poll perhaps a third time.

Here’s Rob again, in one of the comments on the post:

The conversations I’ve had in the last few days about samurai and vikings, with everyone from a 3 year old to a professor of Japanese history, suggest to me that even banal questions can scale to accommodate multiple levels of historical knowledge.

I should emphasize that a vikings vs. samurai clicker question isn’t of much value by itself.  It’s the discussion that it frames and motivates that’s of real educational value.  And that discussion could happen without a clicker question, but I suspect that in many instances, a clicker question would enhance that discussion.

Plus, vikings versus samurai?  How cool is that?

Update: Rob MacDougall’s follow-up post, “Would You Rather,” features more counterfactual questions, ones that point students toward social history and material culture rather than military history and the history of technology.

Image: “Viking” by Flickr user hans s / Creative Commons licensed

I wanted to share a couple of reviews my book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, has received in the year since it’s been available.  There may be other reviews, but these are the two that I’ve seen.

In the Winter 2010 issue of The Review of Higher Education, Jane Freed of Central College and co-author of Learned-Centered Assessment on College Campuses, reviewed the book.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

Bruff convinces me that there are several advantages in using this technology… If the focus of classroom response systems remains on creating active learning environments, then Derek Bruff’s book adds to the on-going conversation about engaging students in their own learning.

Freed also raises an interesting concern: Does teaching with clickers place too much focus on finding the right answers and not enough on focus on helping students learn to ask useful questions?  She writes, “Learning how to navigate successfully through life is often based on knowing what questions to ask.”

This is a valid concern.  In most instances of teaching with clickers, the instructor is the one posing the questions, not the students.  Although, as I mentioned last week, some instructors ask their students to write clicker questions.  Freed’s concern reminds me of a limitation of teaching with clickers I’ve noted before, that they don’t allow instructors to target the “create” category in Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives.

My response to both concerns is that often a clicker question isn’t the end of a learning activity, it is the beginning.  After you ask a challenging clicker question and have students think about and submit their answers, you’ve set the stage for a very productive classwide discussion of that question, a discussion that can surface reasons for and against the various answer choices as well as provide students a forum for asking their own questions about the topic at hand.  This works particularly well when the clicker question has multiple defensible answers, but this kind of exploration and question-asking can occur even when the question at hand has a single correct answer.  It’s important for instructors to remember to engage students in this kind of conversation at least some of the time when asking clicker questions.

In the most recent issue of the journal of the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), Mark Rohland of Temple University reviewed my book.  Rohland had nice things to say about the book:

This book convincingly demonstrates that clicker technology allows teachers and students to adapt quickly to emerging learning needs…  Bruff’s work is an enthusiastic, accessible, and detailed introduction for all educators interested in this popular educational technology tool.

Since this review appeared in a journal for academic advisers, Rohland points out some potential uses of clickers in group advising sessions, “such as getting student feedback about satisfaction with majors, confidence in understanding curriculum, and perceived need for advising.”  He notes that the anonymity that clickers provide students is likely to yield more honest responses from students about advising issues.

Rohland’s one criticism of my book is that many of my examples of clicker use by faculty members I interviewed illustrate very similar points and that this repetition can be distracting to the reader.  I think this is a fair criticism, particularly if one is reading the book straight through, cover-to-cover.  When I read books on teaching, particularly ones I’ve checked out from a library and not purchased, I often skim through the books, looking for passages relevant to my teaching needs at the time.  When I wrote my book, I wanted to make it helpful for someone who was just skimming it in that fashion, which meant that a little redundancy was acceptable.  I’m also aware that many instructors look for examples from their own discipline, so having a few examples from different disciplines to illustrate the same point helps make the book relevant to more readers.

To that last point, I had intended the book to have a discipline index in addition to a regular index.  When I get some time, I’m hoping to compile such a discipline index and post it here on the blog.  Let me know if that would be useful.

Writing this book, my first one but hopefully not my last one, has been a bit of an adventure.  It’s very satisfying to see positive reviews of my book such as these two.

I wanted to share some additional thoughts on Cliff Atkinson’s new book, The Backchannel, and its implications for higher education.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the first chapter of the book is available online and provides a very clear introduction to the logistics and possibilities of the backchannel.  What might the backchannel look like in educational settings?  Here are a couple of examples.

“The Twitter Experiment,” a five-minute YouTube video, shows how UT-Dallas history professor Monica Rankin used Twitter to facilitate a backchannel discussion.  In her case, she had a somewhat large class that she broke into smaller discussion groups.  The students were encouraged to post their thoughts on Twitter during the small-group discussion time.  The Twitterstream was displayed on the big screen for the whole class to see.  This led to some “cross-fertilization” of small-group discussions as ideas generated by one group were read and discussed by other groups.  Dr. Rankin also had a TA monitor the backchannel, responding to student questions and surfacing important points for Dr. Rankin to discuss with the entire class from time to time during the class session.  For more details on Dr. Rankin’s use of Twitter, see my earlier post on this topic.

Purdue University has developed a system called Hotseat that facilitates backchannel discussion.  This system allows students to contribute to the backchannel in a variety of ways, including Twitter and Facebook.  The student contributes are typically displayed on a big screen for the entire class to see, and the instructor typically takes a “Hotseat break” of sorts every now and then to respond to the questions raised in the backchannel.  Students can comment on other students’ posts and they can “vote up” comments or questions their peers post so that instructors have an easier time identifying the most pressing topics.  The Purdue team shared their work on Hotseat at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative earlier today, and, according to Twitter user @eyb, who “live-tweeted” the presentation, students really liked the system.  They didn’t necessarily think it helped them learn better, but they liked it and they wanted their instructors to spend more time responding to the questions raised in the backchannel.

(I’ve been meaning to talk about Hotseat here on the blog for a while now.  Thanks to @eyb for some great reporting at ELI!  I feel I have a much better sense of the system now, technologically and pedagogically.)

What are some other ways that backchannel might function in educational settings?  Cliff Atkinson describes some common and uncommon uses of the backchannel in Chapter 3 of his book.  Here are my thoughts on how Atkinson’s uses might map over to educational settings:

• Notetaking: Students can take their notes during a class in the backchannel.  This provides an electronic (and thus searchable) set of notes for the student.  Moreover, students can read and use each other’s notes more easily.  You might even select two or three students each day to be official class note-takers, freeing other students up for more engagement in class.
• Sharing Resources: Students can also look online (or, call me crazy, in their textbooks) for information that supplements the lecture or class discussion.  It’s easy to share links in the backchannel thanks to all the URL shortening services, and students can be very good at finding useful and relevant information online.  And if a resource shared by a student isn’t useful or relevant, it creates an opportunity to discuss with students how to find and evaluate online information resources.
• Commenting: Students can also comment on the ideas being share or discussed in class.  Just providing a visible venue for student comments is likely to encourage more students to reflect actively during class.  Plus, students can read and respond to each others’ reflections.  Sure, students can contribute to online discussions after class, but there’s something exciting about having more students engage in discussions during class–more than just those who are bold enough and quick enough to contribute verbally.
• Amplifying: The Hotseat feature mentioned above that allows students to “vote up” peer comments they find important is an example of what Atkinson calls “amplifying what others are saying.”  On Twitter, this happens via retweeting: If a comment is retweeted frequently, then many people find it interesting enough to share.  Google Moderator is a free service that works similarly–students can post questions and others can vote them up or down.  This kind of feature is a great way to handle the problem I’ve identified here on the blog several times: It’s really hard for an instructor to follow and make sense of the backchannel during class given the open-ended nature of the comments.  Giving the students the ability to identify more or less relevant comments is one way to help with this.  (Monica Rankin’s use of a moderator–her TA–is another.)
• Asking Questions: I’ve put this a few spots down the list since I think it’s a more obvious use of the backchannel than some of the ones listed above.  Backchannel provides students an additional way to ask questions.  Students are frequently hesitant to ask questions in class for a variety of mostly social reasons–they don’t want to look “dumb” in front of their instructor or their peers.  Anonymous backchannel discussions make it extremely easy for these students to surface their questions.  Even when students are identified on the backchannel, having a venue where questions are encouraged is likely to make it easier for students to share questions.  And if the backchannel includes an amplification tool, then students can support each others’ question-asking very directly.
• Helping One Another: Keep in mind that there are several kinds of backchannel conversations, including student-to-student conversations.  When one student poses a question on the backchannel, another student might very well answer that question before the instructor can get to it.  This kind of peer instruction is a common use of clickers, and it can work well in the backchannel, too.
• Offering Suggestions: The backchannel can give students a voice in where a class discussion goes.  Students can suggest discussion topics or questions.  They can also suggest useful readings, activities, or topics for subsequent classes.  They can provide instructors with feedback on what’s working and what’s not from their perspective.  Many instructors have students complete a “minute paper” at the end of each class in which students identify the most important point of the day or ask a question.  The backchannel allows instructors to gather this kind of feedback whenever students are ready to share it during class.
• Building Community: Particularly in large classes, it can be hard for students to get to know more than just the few students they sit near.  Backchannel discussions can help students get to know each other in a variety of ways.  I would argue that it’s important for students to have avatars or icons attached to their backchannel posts, preferably photos of themselves.  Seeing someone’s face along with their comments and their name helps build actual, not just virtual community.
• Opening the Classroom: Some backchannels are private; that is, only the instructor and students can see or participate in the backchannel conversation.  Others, like Twitter, are public, allowing those outside the classroom to participate in the discussion.  This provides an opportunity to open the class discussion to those not currently enrolled in the course–students taking other courses, students who took the course in the past, academic experts at other institutions, and more.  These external people have the potential to learn from and contribute to the backchannel discussion.

That was fun thinking through these options!  You can have fun, too: What did I miss?  Comments or suggestions for the uses I’ve listed above?

Back in October, I ran a session on supporting faculty using clickers at the POD Network conference in Houston.  Shortly thereafter, I posted here the results of some of the clicker questions I asked at the session asking participants to identify particular uses of clickers are more likely to be implemented by an instructor new to using clickers (“novices”) or more likely only to be implemented by an instructor with some experience teaching with clickers (“veterans”).  In my earlier post, I promised to share some more results of these questions, and here they are…

The majority of session participants felt that using clickers to generate classwide discussion is something that only veteran clicker users do.  My guess is that in courses where class discussion is already more common (small courses, humanities courses, and so on), instructors are more likely to use clickers to enhance those discussions.  In courses where class discussion is less common (large lecture courses, for instance), instructors might be less likely to use clickers for this purpose.

However, I’ve heard a number of faculty who use clickers (particularly ones in the natural sciences) advise other faculty that clicker questions work best when they motivate students to focus on the reasons for and against the various answer choices.  I realize that running a class discussion in a large class can be challenging, but I think in most cases, students benefit from engaging with a clicker question as a class before hearing the instructor’s take on the question.  The good news is that clicker questions give students the opportunity and a motivation to think through a particular question prior to a classwide discussion, which means they’re more likely to be willing to contribute to that discussion.

Here are some results that didn’t surprise me.  Most participants felt that creating “times for telling” by asking clicker questions most students answer incorrectly is an approach to using clickers few of those new to teaching with clickers use.  Why might this be the case?  One reason is that many instructors new to using clickers pose questions designed to see if students understood a point recently made in class.  The hope with these questions is that most students will answer correctly.  These questions are designed primarily for assessment, but questions meant to be answered incorrectly are designed more for engaging students in the learning process.

When students are confronted with results that demonstrate to them their lack of understanding of a particular topic, they are more motivated to resolve whatever misconception they have about that topic in order to understand the right answer.  Not only is this approach to teaching somewhat sophisticated, since it requires at least some sense of the cognitive and affective components of learning, but implementing it also requires having a good sense of what misconceptions students have and designing questions that surface those misconceptions.  All this takes some teaching experience and, in most cases, experience crafting effective clicker questions.

And here are some results that did surprise me.  I talk a lot about using clickers to enable more agile teaching in my presentations on teaching with clickers.  To see that so many of my POD Network colleagues view this use of clickers as something only those experienced with clickers implement was a bit of a shock to me.  Instructors who aren’t using clickers to make their teaching more responsive to student learning needs are missing out on one of the key benefits of clickers.  In fact, there’s some evidence (thanks, Ian Beatty, for sharing that!) that gathering information about student learning and NOT responding to it is worse than not gathering that information at all.

Why might instructors new to using clickers not be comfortable altering their lesson plans on-the-fly in response to the results of clicker questions?  Small deviations from a lesson plan, like explaining a point again when a clicker question indicates students didn’t get it the first time, aren’t too intimidating, but going very far “off script” is a little scary, I think.  Many instructors like to know what to expect when they walk into class.  That’s why we have lesson plans.  Changing those plans midstream is risky: What if your on-the-fly decisions about where to take the class aren’t good ones?  What if you find out students don’t understand what you’ve just explained and you can’t think of a good alternate explanation?  What if your entire lesson plan gets derailed by unexpected clicker question results?

Scary questions!  However, I don’t think agile teaching needs to be quite so daunting.  The basic version of agile teaching goes as follows: If most students answer a clicker question correctly, you can fairly quickly move on to the next item on your lesson plan, but if most answer it incorrectly, you should spend more time on the topic before moving on.  You can even plan ahead for this kind of thing; just build into your lesson plan an alternate explanation or activity to use after each clicker question.  The more nuanced version of agile teaching isn’t that much more complicated: Take a look at which wrong answers are most popular, and drill down on them, having students share reasons for those answers.  Again, you can often plan ahead to handle this.  Try to predict which wrong answers will be most popular and plan a response to each.

So what do you think?  What kinds of conditions might lead an instructor new to using clickers to use them to facilitate classwide discussion, generate “times for telling,” or practice agile teaching?

A little while ago I reviewed an article by David Campt and Matthew Freeman describing the use of clickers in dialogue facilitation.  I was impressed by their nuanced use of participant perspective questions–the kinds of questions I call “student perspective questions” in my book, questions that surface students’ (or dialogue participants’) opinions and experiences.  The idea of using what appears to be a factual question (such as, “What percent of US citizens are people of color?”) to surface participants’ assumptions and impressions was particularly interesting.  Prior to reading their paper, I hadn’t thought of such questions as perspective questions.

More recently, Campt and Freeman wrote a short article for the Web site Religious Conference Manager describing ways clickers might be used in religious settings (sermons, conferences, and so on).  The article describes the kinds of perspective questions I mentioned above, as well as strategies for making the most of clickers in these settings.  The following line stood out to me:

Internet experiences and television shows are creating the expectation that people will be co-creators rather than mere passive vessels.

I hear this perspective expressed frequently in educational technology discussions, particularly in regard to students’ participation in Web 2.0 online tools like Facebook and YouTube, tools where students are not only consumers of content but producers.  I hadn’t thought about this notion in the context of teaching with clickers, however.

Certainly, if you’re giving your students a quiz that requires them to recall a few facts, then you’re not using clickers to help students become “co-creators” of knowledge in the classroom.  However, if you’re asking clicker questions designed to generate discussion (like tough conceptual understanding questions, application questions, or critical thinking questions), then as students involve themselves in that discussion, they are, indeed, become co-creators in their learning.  And if you’re using clickers for perspective questions in the ways that Campt and Freeman do, then the students’ responses (their opinions and experiences) are integral to the learning process, making them co-creators.

When used just for voting, clickers do indeed bring in the interactive element that students are accustomed to having in their daily life–”liking” a friend’s wall post in Facebook, rating a book on Amazon, voting for a favorite contestant on American Idol.  We live in a participatory culture where everyone seems to get a vote, a way to provide feedback.  Clickers provide a way to connection with that culture in the classroom.

Moreover, when used to generate discussion, clickers help motivate an even more participatory culture in the classroom, one similar to that of a blog with an active commenting community.  The author of a blog post gets the conversation going, but everyone weighs in–just like an instructor gets a conversation going by posing an engaging clicker question and the students weigh in via votes and discussion.

What do you think?  Does teaching with clickers work particularly well with students used to a participatory culture?  Do you buy the argument that today’s culture is more participatory than, say, 15 years ago?