Speaker 1: When I came here, I switched to teaching a big lecture class, which I'd never, the biggest class I'd taught before probably had about 80 students, and it included field time and lab time, so I think we sort of had the lab and the field to carry us in some ways in terms of generating student interest. When I arrived here, I took over one semester of a non-majors intro bio course, and it enrolled typically 350 to 400 students, about 60% of which are business majors, give or take, and whatever you want to call a business major, but that's what our survey showed. So the first thing I did was sit in on a class taught by a man who's now passed on named Will Provine, who taught a non-majors evolution course and was sort of famous for engaging students. So I sat in on his course for a whole semester. I made him go for a long walk with me one morning, and I asked him to just tell me anything he wanted to tell me about what he thought had worked and what didn't work. There was a workshop about teaching big classes soon after I arrived here, and it was a weekend-long workshop, and I went to it, and we talked about everything from multiple-choice questions to how do you get them to ask questions in class and stuff like that. So the first thing I did was seek out information. The second thing I did was I sort of had some things from my prior experience that I thought probably mattered no matter the size of the class. I think you need to go in there and tell them who you are and convince them that you're worth listening to. I think you need to go in there and tell them what this course is about and why it should matter to them, and you're going to have to manage to do that that first lecture. I really believe that if you don't, it's going to be really, really tough. I think you need to sort of pay attention to what works and what doesn't and be willing to be criticized, be willing to jettison things that don't work and adopt new things. I think you need to sort of pay attention. So an example of that is not too long after I started teaching the big intro bio for non-majors class, we got iClickers or some early version of clickers. They were actually quite clumsy at first with these big things on stands that were the receivers posted around the room, and the students had these big massive finger things, and now it's all much more sophisticated now. But the idea is the same. So I started using those. I taught a lecture that came in like two 50-minute blocks twice a week, and there was a little break in the middle. And so I started using a clicker question twice in that period. And they're multiple choice by design. And I discovered two things by accident that I thought were huge in the way I used them. The first one was since I was giving them a point for getting a question right, and so they could build up something like 50 points over the course of the semester, about 10% of their grade. Well, they can't talk to each other, right, because that would be cheating. And so that put us in this awkward position of sort of trying to keep them quiet, worrying about that. And one night I just thought, this is nuts. I mean, I could imagine going to a workshop all day long to figure out how to get freshmen who don't know each other to speak up in class and talk to each other and to a teacher. All I have to do is pay them 50 points. And so, and they're not even all going to get it, you know. So I went back to the next lecture and said, new rules, new rules. From now on, we'll have two minutes for each multiple choice clicker question. You can talk to each other. You can open your book. You can call your mom. You can do anything you want. I want everybody in here to get the point, if possible. And sure enough, they'd start talking. And sure enough, you had 350 kids talking about biology for two minutes, twice in each lecture. The second thing was, it's actually kind of hard to make multiple choice questions that are not ambiguous. And Cornell students are expert at spotting any reason to make you give their answer a point, too. And so I'd have a question up there. And the way the clickers work, you know, is they have their two minutes. They all log in their thing. And then you see this bar graph behind you on the screen that shows the percentage that got each answer. And I already realized that a great thing about that is you can, if like 40% of them get the same wrong answer, you just figured something out that you can deal with right there. But what I didn't expect was, it turns out you can make a question that plausibly has more than one right answer without intending to. And it turns out in a class of 350 freshmen, at least one of them is willing to stand up and say, wait a minute, I put C and I want a point. And I would then say, well, you stand up and tell your classmates why C is the right answer. And I had a very liberal approach to that. So if they just gave a reasonably cognizant argument, I would turn to the teaching assistant in charge of that, and I'd say, Anna, we're going to count C right also. And the class would break into applause. It turns out they viewed it as sort of an us against them kind of thing, and they really liked it when a student would show that I was wrong. But I realized, well, this is actually a teaching moment. I'm actually getting one of them to stand up and teach their peers something that wasn't neatly obvious in the question. And the extreme instance of this was I actually once wrote a question that had five plausible answers. And so it was up there. They all logged in. I looked at this unbelievable distribution of, like, no clear modal right answer. And I said, well, that's really interesting, but D is correct. And up went this hand. And I called them. They argued for A, and I go, OK, Anna, we're counting A right. Clap, clap, clap. Now let's move on to the next. Wait a minute, Professor Green. I think B is right also. What? And they worked me through all four other answers, convinced me to count all five right. What a fabulous thing, you know? We got derailed a little bit, but it was a wonderful moment in the classroom because the students were teaching each other. They were interested enough to pay attention to why I wasn't right. That's how I've gotten to be a better teacher, I think, is by going in there with what I thought I knew how to do, watching for ways to do it better.