ES 2018 – Lightning talks – Active Learning May 11, 2018

Enriching Scholarship is an annual series of workshops on teaching and learning at the University of Michigan. This session was a series of lightning talks on Active Learning. There were 7 presenters. Titles below are my quick reinterpretation, not the listed talk titles (lightning talks = no time to type everything, I just wanted to be sure I got the names right!)

Yulia Sevryugina: Strategies in Chemistry

Prof. Sevryugina described a couple strategies she uses for her large chemistry lab.

• Syllabus game
• • Students generally don’t read the syllabus, and don’t really pay attention if you go over it during class, so this is intended to engage the students actively with the syllabus. It also models some lab classes, though she didn’t say if it modeled the way her class operates.
  • The room is set up with stations, and the class is divided into groups. The stations can be completed in any order except the last one. At each station is a printed copy of the syllabus, and question sheets. As each group visits a station, they pick up and fill out the question sheet for that station. Once they have all the sheets filled out, they go to the last station, where they meet the instructor, get a sweet, and discuss some of the questions.
  • Some of the questions are actually discussion topics, such as “find out why your other groups members are taking this class” or “share some learning strategies you think will help you succeed in this class.”
  • Questions are designed to cover FAQs, help the students get to know each other, and get to know the instructor.
  • Assessment is points for completion of the question sheets
• Canvas Discussion / Piazza
• • The anonymous option helps make the instructor more approachable, and decreases the students’ embarrassment with asking questions in front of their peers.
• Jigsaw classroom
• • The students are first divided into “expert” groups. Each group is given an area to study at home and become an expert in. At the next class, new groups are formed with one person from each expert group: the jigsaw. Each jigsaw group is given a task or activity to complete as a group, which can include an artifact for formal assessment.
  • final grades should generally be a group grade, but should include a component for individual preparation, so students can’t shirk the expert phase.
  • It’s usually very useful to have a decompression phase at the end. In particular, it is helpful to have a whole-class discussion to ensure students identify holes in their expertise, or weaknesses in their problem solving strategies.
  • This technique can be used to increase student preparation. It slightly decreases the workload (e.g. instead of having to understand all of Newton’s laws, each student only really has to understand one) but increases the stakes (the jigsaw group is counting on that student for the information.)

Eri Bell: Increasing student interest in science via a capstone research project 

Prof. Bell introduced a research project culminating in a poster session in several large astronomy classes. He showed data for Astro 101 in Fall 2017, indicating that the large scale group project did intact significantly increase student interest and confidence in science. This is a large class, 180 students, but the poster session was still manageable. He offered a few tips and takeaways.

• leave enough time for final revisions.
• a good presentation space is important. posters in the lecture hall stifled conversation by making it difficult to move around. Having it in a space where the department members and surrounding departments could visit gave it much more of a feeling of a real poster session.
• require peer interactions by requiring something like two peer evaluations or reports of other posters so that students are forced to interact with the other posters
• I’ll add that from my point of view, having a good rubric was important. In particular, we needed to make sure we were grading on content, not appearance, so having specific measurable items was important to ensuring we gave fair grades.

Jessie Lee: Gallery walk sale presentation

Previously in HRM 305, students had done a final project where they were supposed to come up with an HR plan then give presentation at end of class. However, the other students really only engaged in passive listening, so the presentations didn’t seem very valuable except as a summative assessment, not at all like the real world. Prof. Lee changed it to be more like a gallery walk (think opening night of an art exhibition, or a poster session!)

• held in a collaborative leaning space, where there are movable tables and chairs and wall-mounted monitors. Student groups were set up at stations around each monitor, or in groups that could travel from station to station. People at each station give a 10 minute talk, then 3 min Q&A. After the Q&A, the audience can move to a new station.
• Students provide peer feedback on the presentations. The feedback form is structured and includes specific questions, as well as an opportunity for general comments. The presenters really liked getting the feedback.

Carol Shannon Teach, Assess, Revise: using assessment to drive revision

~2013 the college of pharmacy noted some issue with their curriculum: students were not working effectively, reported learning skills much later in the program than they should hav, and the faculty and staff had fundamental misconceptions about what students knew when they came in to the program. For example, students have no idea how to use the internet for scholarly research.

They needed new curriculum to address these issues.They changed problem sets to more closely match real-life scenarios, tried to match the specifics of what students rally needed (e.g. pubMed & Embase search). They began using a pre-test for all students to determine what was needed, and post test to see what the retained. Students learned more in classes where they had to do pre-work, so they’ll be revising the curriculum again!

Ruth Lee: Google Docs in first year writing class

Prof. Li taught ENG 125 – freshmen english (required). Classes are primarily discussion sections with about 20 students per class. She used many features of Google Docs to enhance collaboration, including real-time collaboration in class. Some examples:

• assign an essay to read with things like vocabulary, citations, other items already highlighted. The highlights were color coded. This modeled what she expected the students to learn.
• brainstorming – groups were given a section of google doc to work on, then were able to evaluate the other groups’ work without having to share documents.
• group commenting – everyone put in their thesis statement, then  peers comment on it
• class reading chart – Students make comments about the readings without identifying which reading. Peers try to identify the reading and give an explanation for why they think the comment belongs with that reading.

The students interacted well together, and were more meta-aware of the writing and collaborative process. Google docs work well in the relatively small group.

Further scaffolding to develop reading and writing skills would help (there’s always more work to be done!)

Dave Choberka – UMMA Exchange

exchange.umma.umich.edu

UMMA has a collection database, but searching is hard because the keywords are limited (e.g. a search for Whistler or “Sea and Rain” would turn up the painting by that title, but not a search for “beach”, even though it’s a person walking on a beach.) Also, research on the collections tends to disappear after its done. The Exchange solves some of those problems.

• you can create groups of objects, like all the things that seem to be about zombies
• • Once a group of objects is created, if you view one of the objects, it will show you all groups the object is on, and all the related objects.
  • You can select “On display” to see only objects that are actually on display in the museum.

• You can create virtual exhibitions, which include text and resources from outside to help put the UMMA artifact in context.

Dominique Butler-Borruat:  “Lets talkabroad”

This is an online platform that provides trained conversation partners. It’s not just for language classes, it’s for conversation practice, including practice for professional communication. There is a fee per conversation. The conversation partners are vetted and coached before the conversations. Instructors can specify a region or the world (e.g. Prof. Butler-Borruat has students talking with people in French Guiana).