I hope we focus Friday more on issues like those in this video than in the other two essays.  This seems to get at the heart of what we’re all doing or should be trying to do.

I’ve had some success with this type of peer instruction — assigning problems from the textbook for students to discuss in groups of three for 10-15 minutes, with the caution that if they all quickly come to the same answer, they’re probably not analyzing the problem sufficiently.  (Class is business law).

Unfortunately time is taken from this by recommendations that one can’t just rely on the students doing the reading assignments or understanding them if they have.  As a result, have started reviewing the topic(s) with Power Point slides which, imo, is backsliding by putting the “transfer of information” format back into the classroom rather than before it.

I think wha you pubished was vey logical. But, think aout this,
suppolse yyou weee to wrire a killer headline?
I ain’t saying yopur content isn’t solid, hwever whzt if you added a titlpe thawt grabbed
people’s attention? I ean Activity #3: Peerr Instruction for Active
Learning | CTL Summsr Workshop oon Teaching
iss a llittle plain. Yoou ought to lok at Yahoo’s front
page aand noite how they create adticle headlines too grab viewets interested.
Youu might add a video or a picture orr two to grb readers
exdited abut everything’ve written. In mmy opinion, iit could make you
blog a little bit mote interesting.

I definitely use group-work (see below), but I’ve been less successful with student presentations as a method of peer instruction.

I never experienced peer instruction as a student; I, like Mazur, was lectured at throughout my undergraduate career.  I do use peer workshops for the purpose of keeping up a kind of competition among students.  They write better when they know their fellow students will be reading the work, and eventually they write paragraphs and collective essays together.  This cannot be done immediately at the beginning of the term.  Students are often shy and do not want to share their writing, especially if they are poor writers.  Peer workshops help in overcoming timidity and also improves skills.

My BA is in Mathematics and many times as a student we learned more from working with each other versus the Chalkboard lecture.

So I agree with the success, however so far I have not used it in class.

I always really appreciate not only the questions that come up when students work on problems together, but the way they work together to begin to develop a problem-solving logic that they can implement on future questions

Memorizing recipes happens in life … there’s no time for anything.  So when Mazur stumbled upon the peer instruction concept, the lightbulb went on.  I absolutely love paired sharings and have used it consistently in my classes and while I see the class ‘groups’ totally engaged, I can literally feel the energy level rise in the classroom.  Very exciting stuff.

Group work is a big part of my classes, and works particularly well for texts like poems that students find challenging. Sometimes I’ll use a jigsaw method, where students are each assigned a different question, or a different section of the text, and then get together with students who have a different section or question, to bring together their answers, work out questions they might have, and answer a new question that ties their work together–having each come in as an “expert.”

Teaching themselves engages them more actively. Also avoids the “curse of knowledge”. Gives them an opportunity to have those “aha moments” in the classroom.

I currently have a groups of students working together to do power point presentations on different business plans

Very interesting video.  I’m looking forward to the program on 6/17.

In my class “Selling and Sales Management”, it is more of an “applied” subject, and less on science.  Students have to use critical thinking in real time.  As part of their grade, I have the students do a Live Sales Role Play, with a fellow student, and we discuss after regarding pros/cons, what they did right, and where they could have done better.

I believe that this type of assignment, plays into what Prof Mazur is discussing within this video.

We can discuss further on 6/17.  Thanks. DCS

Hey Meredith – just in case we forget to mention it on the day of the workshop, have you ever seen the Zicklin guide for group work and oral presentations? I’m an English instructor, too, and though not all of it is totally usable in my context, I’ve found it to be a really helpful resource for thinking through and structuring group presentations. We’ll post it to our resources page and give you the address with the post-workshop evaluation.

We’re also going to look at some Vocat applications (Baruch’s homegrown video annotation and sharing platform) at the workshop. In case you’ve never played around with that, it might open up some new options for group (or individual) presentations.

That’s such an interesting distinction: there are the analysis skills that we need to have to look at the text (and we might be experts in those), and then there’s the text itself (which may be new). So the text itself wouldn’t necessarily fall under “the curse of knowledge,” right?

I wonder if there are analogous circumstances in other people’s fields.

I like what Meredith writes about teaching new texts. It keeps us honest, doesn’t it?! I recently took Chinese 101 and I learned how hard learning something new is–and that quizzes really do get you to study, by the way! It increased my empathy for my students. Sometimes it is hard to know what they know though. The more knowledgeable ones speak more (often), and we instructors, breathless and ambitious, can let that bury the bewildered–something to watch out for (I remind myself.)

I agree with Mazur that a student who has just learned the material may be in a better position to help another student.

I have heard quite frequently that the instructor lecturing is not as effective as student to student interaction. It is hard to let go of the lecture method.

Mazur has inspired me to give it  shot. I want to learn more about the  flipped classroom.

I think it depends on the individuals.  Each person, as we all know, has his/her own way of integrating information. Peer learning is certainly a useful and powerful tool. In another course I teach at another university, I use peer learning from time to time. But that class is much smaller than the one I teach at Baruch.

Right now only by testing and presentations to see if they have the concepts correct.

The assessment part was not clear to me.  The test that opened his eyes emphasizes real-world applications of physics. He realized that students did well on exams based on the textbook and the formulas which they memorized, but could not apply this learning to the real world. This realization led to the peer teaching breakthrough that he had. But does he now assess students with REAL WORLD scenarios? Does he rely on essay-format in his exams more than before?

An interesting question.  As teachers we have so many tests to grade and that seems to be the standard measurement technique.  But “learning” is not the same as “passing the test”.  Learning is really about understanding and applying what you’ve learned to real life.  That is probably best ‘measured’ (tested) via essay responses but let’s be honest folks:  can you really have enough time in the day to grade essay questions on hundreds of exams and by the way, what about the student who will complain after not getting an A that the standard of grading is not objectively set?

With time and ethical constraints, therefore, it does indeed seem to be easier to measure learning with a Scantron.

I hope we learn about another way at the Workshop!!

Does Mazur let low-paid adjuncts from NYC sit in on his physics course? 😉