Speaker 1: I thought the way we discussed how to structure this, and what I think each of us is going to try to do is give a very brief list of things that we do, and then I'll say a tiny little bit about each, but mostly, and people can ask questions, because the point is, you are all at different places, rather than say a lot of things that you don't need to know or are not interested in, but we can focus on the things that would help you the most. So I did, I made some slides only because they remind me what to say, so I will start. So I'm Brian White from the biology department, and so, and that's my email address if anyone wants to contact me. Well of course, I wrote an arrow key, that's what I'm going to have to do, there we go. So what I want to talk about, just a little bit about the class, so you know what I'm talking about. The class meets Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 12 noon, in Lipke Auditorium, and anybody's welcome to come, and I don't mean it because it's like the most excellent lecture class on the face of the earth, in fact, I'm sure you'll see some things that you'll think, oh my god, I would never want to do that. But in any case, you're welcome to come anytime, Lipke is enormous, if you've never been there, it's a circus, so I would never notice or be intimidated, you can come and say hi, but you're certainly welcome to come and check it out, for positive and negative examples I've grouped the kinds of things I do in this class into some things about division of labor, dynamic lectures is a more than excessively pretentious title for that, I regret that word, but they're sort of ways to change lecture, using clickers and some active learning things, so I'll say something about those. So Bio 111 and 112, there are 300 to 400 students, it's intro level, majors and non-majors, what's slightly important for this is that it is not strictly a lecture class, there's three 15 minute lectures a week, and one three hour lab section taught by a grad TA, so that for one of those things about division of labor, which I'll talk about, that's something that some classes have and some don't. The main things that I try to, a lot of the common themes in a lot of these have to do with I want to know where the students are at, to get a sense of what they're thinking, so I can target what I'm saying to where they're having trouble. And active learning is this notion, it's been around a lot of different ways, came to the biologists relatively recently, this notion that if I tell you something, and then I have you use it in some way, even almost just reiterating it, just some, take it for a walk, a little bit of a test drive, you will learn it a lot better than if I move on to the next thing directly, so there's a variety of techniques for doing that sort of thing. So among these different things that I use is some division of labor, trying to think about what makes the most sense to do in different places. So in lecture I try to do the big picture but not all of the details, and some, my classes focus on a lot of application, so I'll do a, but you can't learn to solve problems by watching somebody do it in lecture, but I can set up some of the ideas and they can then do that in lab, and so in lab there's more application and hands-on, I have that luxury that a class with this division has, ones which, without discussion, is a bit more challenging. Even absent the lab, there's some other division of labor things that I've done to do is to get the students to do some stuff outside of class and come to class prepared. I mean they always have reading, but the reading in my class I put very little emphasis on, which sort of makes me different from I think you would be like in the English department for example. My view of the reading is that if you didn't get it in lecture, it's a backup, but it's not, if it's not, wasn't in lecture, it's not going to be part of the class for the most part. What I do get them to do, there are two things that I've started doing recently, what I call warm-ups and homework, and the warm-ups are a way to get them thinking about stuff before class. They are typically, so they're due on blackboard like an hour before class, and they are problem typically about something that they haven't heard anything about yet, or they might have heard something, the very, the thinnest bit of background, and so like a classic thing in genetics is to talk about Mendel's round and wrinkled peas, you may have heard of it, so before they even heard about round and wrinkled peas, I have them do a little work with a computer simulation that gives them an experience like that. So they come into class with questions, why did they do that, and so my, the homework is, the check-offs, the warm-ups are great, it's a check-off, if you give it a try, you get full credit, but the idea is that they should come into class having a common experience, so like you also, and I can also say, and they would probably have questions that then motivate what I want to talk about in lecture, they come into class with a certain amount of struggle and puzzlement and they're ready to hear more, and in homework, there's ways to give them sort of graded problems out there. Yeah?

Speaker 2: Out of 300 to 400 students, how many people actually submit the warm-up before a class?

Speaker 1: I don't know, they get a small amount of credit for it, so I imagine most do, I actually have a bunch. So you don't look at what they submit? I do, but I don't look at all of them, because it's 400 students, so I'll look at, I mean, from judging from it, I would say the majority, the greater than three quarters do it, and so I'll look at, and I'll, so I'll look at a couple of them to give an idea of what to say when a class comes in, and the idea of all of these things is, I can deliver certain information in lecture, and I can do a little tiny bit of conversation, but what they can do outside of class is do some background, a little bit of puzzling, maybe thinking about the material some, and they can certainly do some homework outside of class, so to divide up into what is best done in a large group versus what they can do on their own at home. Now, on their own at home, before they've seen the material, they can't understand it completely, but they can have a first pass at it, for example, and after I've done lectures, they have a chance to do it in order to. So again, this is an extremely pretentious title, but the, so things that I do in lecture to make it not just your ordinary stand up there and talk is, I actually don't, in contrast to this, I do not use PowerPoint. So I actually have a tablet PC, and I write on the tablet, typically I'll mark up a handout, so I'll have, every class has handouts that the students can buy in a binder from Quinn Graphics, and there'll be some figure that they'll mark up, or I'll just sometimes, what I used to do is write on the blackboard, but now I write on the tablet, and the advantage of the tablet is I can switch back and forth between video stuff if I want, I can also make a PDF of it, post it on the web. What I like about that is you can develop things more cleanly, or sort of a longer, sort of a long, how can I say this, PowerPoint has only a short amount of stuff on a slide, and then boom, it's all gone. The nice thing about the tablet is it sort of scrolls, which is like the blackboards used to be back in the day when you could roll the blackboards up, and so if somebody spaces out or loses my train of thought, they can go back and look, whereas once the slide's gone, you haven't got it. The other thing I like about writing on the tablet is it is a speed match, in fact I'm talking very fast now, but in class I would talk more slowly. Writing forces you to slow down, right, and because they're trying to write at the same time as well, and I'm also, since it's a freshman bar, I'm trying to teach them how to take So I have some animation, so I break up rather than just talking, I have animations of things that are hard to get. The nice thing about big classes is you can do demonstrations where you actually use the students, so sometimes you're in a position where you can, where like, I should do some probability simulation, where people come to understand like, if you have a genetic disease, risk of one quarter, what does it really mean if you have a family of four children, so you can have each one of the students be a family of four children, and you can collect statistics on a large sample size. I also use them when we talk about action potentials, which is how nerves transmit messages, I have them do the wave and the other term, and there are various ways, and it serves several functions. One is it's a very nice, strong idea, image of what's happening, also it sort of breaks up the blah, blah, blah into more manageable units. I also provide them with all sorts of handouts, so like any complicated figure I'm going to use, I put it on a handout so that they can mark it up, rather than have to try to sketch it.

Speaker 2: Are those paper handouts, or do you just put them on blackboard?

Speaker 1: So I put them, they're on the course website, but I also, they can, I encourage them strongly to buy a binder of them at the beginning of the semester down at graphic arts, just because it's that, they always have them with them. I also post lecture audio, there's a, so I don't hand them out, but they can buy them. I also record lecture audio, most of the large lecture halls have a facility for doing that, and I post that on the web. That's been really useful, because it lets, at the very least, lets students do what they can't do in lecture, which is, can you say it again? Can you say it again? Can you say it again? Right? Which you can never do in class, but they can do it easily in one line. And I also post lecture notes again, in case people miss class, or also to make sure that they have sort of the, if they miss some detail. Other stuff. I use clickers, there are, how many people know, do you know what I'm talking about when I say clickers are? Is there anybody who has not heard of clickers? Okay. Yes. Alright. So what they are. Pardon? What you're doing again. Excuse me. Yes. So what clickers are, they're a little radio transmitter, it looks like a sort of like a TV remote, more or less, with a couple of buttons on it, and I can ask a multiple choice question in lecture, and students beam in their answers. And I can give them a small amount of credit for that, and at the end, so give them two minutes, say, to beam in answers, and you get a histogram of how many people gave each of the five, it's a five choice, multiple choice. And so then you can use that in a host of different ways, sort of poll the students about where they're at. Does that make sense? Thank you. So there are all sorts of different uses. I use some of the more prosaic ones, other people use even more advanced ones. I start my classes with a warm up, you know, very first, we're coming to class, we have a question to answer. Typically I want them to get that wrong, and I give people credit whether they get it right or wrong, because then I can then say, ha, ha, you fell into my trap, it turns out that not all, oh, I don't know, fungi aren't the only things that have spores. And so here's why I didn't tell you about that. And I ask students once on a survey, does it upset you to start the class by getting something wrong? And then what they say is, no, actually, then I need to pay attention because I got it wrong. At the end of every lecture, there's a summary. So if you got the main point of today's class, you should be able to get it right. Those are the only ones I use it for. Students like that because then they sort of know whether they got it or not, or they have to study more. People use them for quizzes in class. There's some logistical things about getting that to work, but you could ask a series of multiple choice questions that way. Sometimes if I have time, on the last question, or on one of the questions, if a large number of people get it wrong, you can say, ha, this is, or typically you get just a flat distribution of all the people who probably say, hmm, not all of these can be right, why don't you talk to your neighbor, and then revote, which is another way to get people to think about things.

Speaker 2: So quizzes is what you call peer instruction, right?

Speaker 1: Well, no, I don't actually do quizzes. I don't, well, I'll talk about that kind of thing in a second. And there's some people who really go all the way, where you, basically you start with a question, and then you explain, the lecture basically starts using the question as a starting point, the answer, student's answer to the question, the starting point. And of course, I always post the answers. So this active learning thing, this is about using it right after you've heard it. In questions in lecture, this is probably, probably everybody knows this, but I thought I'd say it anyway. The classic, I explain something, and I say, are there any questions, is not bad, except the trouble is most people don't even know what to ask, because they don't know what, at what level are they supposed to know it. So like if I said, you know, you guys read that article about the stuff, the trouble at the probation department, you would say, and I said, any questions, well, what am I supposed to know about that, right? So if on the other hand, you give them a problem to solve, that requires them to understand at the level that you care about, then you'll get questions, right, because either they'll answer it, which is great, or if they don't, then you get questions that you need to fill in. So I try always to ask questions in that form if I can. I don't know if, Ed, if this is what you call peer instruction, there's this thing, there's lots of different jargon terms for these, this think-pair-share, which is I say, here's a question, think about it, talk to your neighbor, argue about it, and then I'll get a show of hands, you know, to volunteer to answer the question, which is a very effective way of getting people to think about things in my job. I've lately gone to the sort of most extreme example of that. This works quite well, is getting people thinking and talking about it. The problem with this is that not everybody will think about it. And then I also learned pretty quick that when Steph's hand goes up, she always knows the right answer. You can stop thinking, because she's going to give the right answer. And if I want everyone to think about things, and I want a good sample of whether people get it or not, then I think people raise their hands is kind of a problem, because I'm probably going to get all right answers and go to that teacher's delusional state where you believe that you're a genius and everyone is getting everything they want. You still have people raise hands, but do you have the clickers? You could do clickers. The problem is, clickers don't allow for explanation, because it's a multiple choice. Yeah, but I mean... Yeah, can you hang on one second? Okay. Okay. So, part of the difficulty is getting everyone to think about it in a serious way, and getting a good random sample of what people get and don't get. And so, what I've started doing is actually call... I have a way to use the clickers to call a random name from the class list, because I don't know students' names, so I can't know them by name. And I do a host of things to make that as low pressure as possible, because had I had that happen to me, I would be totally mortified to be called on in lecture and have to answer. And so, I say... What I typically do is always after think-pair-share, so it's not, you know, Steph, what's your answer? It's what are you and your... What's the consensus of your group, right? I make a huge fuss about wrong answers are often times much more useful than right answers, which happens to often times turns out to be true. And I say, you can pass. You can also email me to be on a do-not-call list, and you get a teeny, you know, a dozen out of 400 students asked to be on the do-not-call list, and you get a teeny-weeny little bit of points for having the spotlight shined on you. And the last thing I say is, it's my job to make you look good, so, you know, whatever you say, I've got to make something out of it. This has worked amazingly well. The student feedback has been extremely positive, which is really quite surprising, because I thought they would be as mortified as I. They really like it, because they get some thinking about it. It has totally changed the dynamic in the classroom. In Libkey, with 400 students, well, in a good day, there's 300 students out of a 400-student class. I'm sure children have been conceived in the back row. The guys that go on there would just make your hair stand up, right? So, and I used to spend a huge amount of time shushing them, because there's just so many, and people literally can't hear in the back, because of all the noise. It has completely changed. I'm spending much less time shushing them now, because they're paying attention, because their name could come up. I don't like using fear to motivate people. However, in this case, there are so many positive things about it. The other thing is, the class is much more active. You get questions and answers from the back row, which I almost never used to get. People are much more tuned in. So, the mortification associated with this, and the sort of negative social issues with this, for my feeling, have been sort of way overwhelming by the fact that it's been quite this positive. And that's it. So, that's my little bit. I don't know if anyone has any questions now. Yeah, Rick.

Speaker 3: A couple of questions. Sure. With iClickers, you said that you post the answers. I mean, one of the things I keep finding is that students want answers, but they don't want to necessarily figure out the answer. They're just seeing the answer allows them to win the exam. I have that same problem. I have that problem for iClickers. Even though I go over the exam, the question, you know, it's on the screen. It's, you know, just A, B, C, and D. It probably takes one second to write down the correct answer. And yet, they always come back to me and say, can you post all the answers for the iClickers? And the questions they already have, you know, because those are in my PowerPoint. I use PowerPoint still, but they're pasted into the PDF for the PowerPoints if they want to look them up. But I deliberately don't give them the answer because it seems like they think the answer will allow them to succeed on the exams as opposed to figuring out the answer. I have the same problem with the homework problem. You know, they want an old exam and everything. They figure they just want a collection of answers. It doesn't matter what question it is. It's just a collection of answers.

Speaker 1: There's two sides to that. I think there is, it does, giving the answers does feed into this notion that if I could just see every possible problem Rick could answer and memorize all the answers, then I'm going to be able to do an exam. But on the other hand, I think I do it because, yes, it has that pathology, but it also has the positive effect that when people are studying, they need to know what the right answer is. And I'll use it, I'll take an iClicker answers, and when I give answers to homework, I'll explain it so that they have something to study from. Because I found that a while ago that the students don't just need the answer, they need some explanation of how to do it. And some people abuse that, but the good, most of the students, well, I don't know if it's most, but the good students will use that as a place to study from. Because without answers, it's like if I'm learning to play guitar and I play guitar with earplugs in, how do I know if I'm any good, right? Those answers provide feedback as to whether they got it or not. And so my feeling is you can't, you've got to give it to them, even though it causes those problems.

Speaker 2: Well, I think that the iClicker questions are designed in the education research that behind them is designed so that you discuss the questions after you give them. Right. So we always have a classroom discussion of each question before we finish with it.

Speaker 1: It depends on how you're using them. Because like in my case, we typically don't. So like the question at the end of class, everybody's getting up to leave. And so we don't have a discussion of the answer. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So I try not to do it right at the end of class. But if I get caught at the end of class, then we do the discussion in the next class. But the whole idea of the question is that they have to look at it, discuss it, and then they give their answers. And then the whole class goes over what the answers are. And I'm presuming you understand.

Speaker 3: I do what you do, to hear, share, whatever. Yeah, right. Talk to your neighbor. When students, again, the two things that the iClickers are good for, one, to tell a student that they're on target, and two, to tell me whether I've missed the boat in terms of explaining it. And when very few students get it correct, I always do that. I say, OK, you guys got it wrong. Talk to your partner. Talk to your neighbors. Discuss it for a minute. And then we'll do the iClicker again. And usually they start, then they're doing what you're saying. They're discussing the question, moving, presumably getting the right answer the next time around. So I do some of that. But they still come back to me and say they want answers for every single thing that I've ever done.

Speaker 1: No, I think this is a long conversation. But the other folks need to, I should let Cheryl come up and do your thing, too.