- Welcome everyone to this session
on active learning in synchronous remote classes.
My name is Jen Garrett Ostermiller Missteps.
I ran the center for teaching and learning
and I'm really excited to have developed
and be facilitating this workshop
with two of our faculty associate colleagues.
And I will let them introduce themselves.
Allison, do you want to start?
- Yes, I'm Allison Anacker.
I'm a lecture in psychological science
and they teach for the undergraduate neuroscience program.
And like Jen said, I'm a faculty associate
with the center for teaching and learning.
- [Laura] So I'm Laura Almstead.
I'm a faculty member, a senior lecturer in plant biology
and I'm a secondary appointment
in nutrition and food science.
And I teach a range of courses from intro biology
to biochemistry, to a kitchen science class.
And I have been thrilled to be a faculty
associate with CTL this year.
- And Laura, do you want to take control of the slide?
- I wasn't sure if you were gonna say anything more.
- So welcome to everybody.
Thank you guys for engaging
in our little icebreaker activity
of posting a gift or emojis.
It's like everybody chose to post gifts, which is fabulous.
So this is a great example of something you can do
at the beginning of class
to start things off on a slightly lighter foot
perhaps throughout the some conversation
and basically kick things off
in a nice way of building community.
So this is an example of something I've done
in all of my classes when I've been teaching remotely.
So I taught one fully remote class
and one mixed class this past fall.
And I found that staring blankly at my wall at home
or in the classroom, because there were people
who attended the mixed class in person.
I guess it'd be really boring on my part.
So I started putting things
in the chat or asking students questions
and it really started kicking things off in a better way.
I also found that it helped encourage
additional participation during the class
because students were more primed
to be ready to converse both with me and with each other.
So a couple examples of icebreaker activities you can use
would be something like we just did,
which is a gift, maybe a gift of the day
or something that's centered around class material.
You could also think about posting a news article
or a cartoon, that was related to class material.
That's something I've done
in in-person classes quite frequently
or just an informal questions.
Some of the ones I used in my classes
were like your favorite (mumbles)
or what's your favorite thanksgiving food
or food that you love to eat.
Another example and this is actually
one that I used frequently
in my bio one class so frequently, pretty much every day
after I started was to post a pun at the beginning of class.
So my mom gave me a pun calendar, so they weren't mine.
And I had quite a range to pick from
but I would post a pun in the chat
and it got to be so popular that one day
the students and I were in the chat
talking about something else
and then it was time for class to start
and somebody said, "Hey, where's the pun?"
But just a quick example here.
This one, my pun was, I have a fear of elevators
but I've started taking steps to avoid it.
So somebody posted a little gift of a clip
in the elevator and somebody else chimed in
with a another counter pun that's really uplifting.
And then those students went off on a conversation about
Christmas movies that they watched
or other movies that they liked.
And so it was a nice way to just kick off class.
So as I mentioned, I taught both remote class
fully remote class and a mixed class this past fall.
So just to get kind of a baseline understanding
of where you guys are coming from,
it would be great if you would type in the chat,
what modalities you taught in the fall
or are planning to teach in the spring.
Somebody is teaching all the way across the board.
We've got a lot of remote synchronous, some in-person
most are definitely remote here.
Some people are teaching all across the board.
So it looks like some people had experience
and I know more people are still probably typing in.
Some people have had experience
teaching remote synchronous classes
or mixed classes and bedding those of you
who will be teaching them in the spring
have also been thinking about them.
So I definitely want to encourage you
as the workshop progresses to pop in the chat
type some ideas or questions that you have.
Keep trying to use my arrow
and it doesn't work on this slide.
Okay, here we go.
So as you know, the purpose of our workshop today
is to talk about some strategies
and tools to incorporate active learning
into remote synchronous classes.
So we'll use an adapted version
of a process described by Dee Fink in his book
called "Creating Significant Learning Experiences."
And you guys will actually have an opportunity
to read a short excerpt from that book a little bit later.
So think with the founding director
of the instructional development program
at university of Oklahoma and currently
works as a consultant higher ed.
And then the process he describes
at as integrated course design
the first steps are to analyze situational factors.
So these are things about your course
and the specific one we're focusing on
today is remote synchronous classes.
And once you've considered your situational factors
you formulate the learning goals,
design the feedback and assessment procedures
and then think about the teaching and learning activities.
And the goal of this process is to really make sure
that these three things are tied
that your active learning activities are tied
to your learning goals which are tied
to your feedback and assessment.
Now what we'll be focusing on active learning activities
and learning goals.
So we'll be skipping that third part for today
but I definitely encourage you to be thinking
about those as we work through the workshop.
So I'm gonna give you an opportunity
to engage very briefly in this thought process.
So we'll walk through a series of steps
and then we'll have your share the outcome of those steps
in the chat at the end.
So for the moment, just kind of jot things down for yourself
on a piece of paper.
So I want everybody to identify a specific goal
or learning outcome you want to achieve this semester.
This could be solving some problem from fall 2020,
or re-imagining an approach to a topic
that you're teaching in the spring
or that students find challenging,
or just a mechanism of achieving
a specific learning outcome.
So give everybody a minute or so to write something down.
Okay, so hopefully you've had time to jot something down.
So now I want you to think about what you would do
if you were teaching under normal conditions in-person
to achieve your goal and specifically try to brainstorm
some things you categorize as active learning.
So keep in mind that active learning
means having students actually do something
with what they're learning
not just passively receiving information.
I'll give everybody a minute to write,
at least a couple of thoughts down.
So as you're finishing up writing down some of your thing
I want you to put a little flag or star or something
next to activities that would need to be remodify
in a remote class.
So something that you would need to adapt
or change in some sort of way
in this new model of teaching remotely.
Okay, so hopefully everybody's had a chance to
at least brainstorm a couple ideas, flagged something.
So now those of you who are willing,
it would be great if you choose one of your activities
that you marked as needing modification
and type it in the chat.
So one of those active learning activities
that would need to be tweaked or tuned a little bit
to teach remotely.
It looks like we've got one thing pair share.
Or a worksheet where students draw a graph.
Small group discussions with the added challenge
of a graded sheet.
We're working and discussing with a partner,
the anatomical features.
That's an awesome activity.
Using iClickers, we'll definitely touch on that.
Yeah and my equipment, definitely a challenge.
Wait and see if we can get one more.
Anybody else willing to share?
In all group discussions or parts of the whole class
for a whole class discussion, awesome.
Jen unmute dear.
- We appreciate the thinking
that you all are doing upfront
about some of the active learning techniques
that you already use in your in-person classes.
And our goal today is to give you some ideas
about how these might be converted
as well as a kind of framework for thinking
about what active learning might be successful
in your classes.
And we'll be revisiting these goals
once you have a little bit more fodder
to work from towards the end of the workshop.
To ground us a little bit more deeply
in this thinking about active learning,
we're gonna have you actually do a very
such a short activity of silent reading.
And this was an aha moment for me.
I follow a lot of educators on Twitter
and saw this come through in November
an instructor who teaches at Washburn University,
who said I've been giving my students silent reading time
during zooms and it correlated with significantly
more participation from students.
I thought, yes, I do that in-person all the time.
We'll do some reading for homework
and then I'll pull an excerpt that I want students
to really concentrate on.
And so we'll take five minutes
to read silently in class
to then launch into the discussion.
I thought this was such a great idea
that I wanted to model it here and also encourage you
to do that kind of thinking, what do you do in-person
that might work just as well
with a little bit of modification online?
So we're gonna actually do
a little silent reading activity together.
I'm going to upload a very short excerpt
from a guide written by Dee Fink,
who's the author of the book that Laura referenced earlier.
It's a three page PDF that's uploading to our space.
And the first page is just telling you
where the sources is,
so you don't have to spend a lot of time on that page.
The second page has a little bit of text
and then the third page is a table
that illustrates some of the ideas on the second page.
So you're gonna concentrate on the second and third page
and the majority of the the reading is on that second page.
So I'm gonna set a little timer for five minutes
to give you all five minutes.
And as you're reading I want you to think about
three prompts, I'm gonna ask you to respond to one of them.
And that response will be in a shared document
that I will post in just a little bit
after we're done reading.
So the prompts are one of these three things.
One, an emergent idea for me about active learning is.
Two, my current teaching aligns with this framework because
and three, I could utilize this framework to help my goal.
The one that you were identified just a few minutes ago by.
So those are kind of fill in the blank sentences
and I'm going to start my timer now for five minutes
for us all, to do a little brief reading together.
We're about halfway through our silent time.
Don't forget the three prompts,
you're gonna choose one of them to respond to
there on the slide.
(alarm ringing)
So that is our five minutes.
I like using the little quiet alarm on my phone
to call folks back from activities that the little well tip
if you have a mobile device that has an alarm
just a gentle chime is a nice way to bring people back.
So I hope that that sort of stepping back a little bit
and thinking about what is active learning,
thinking about this broader framework of active learning,
gave you some kind of new inspiration
as you're thinking about your goal for your class.
So what I'd like to do next is I'm going to share a document
and it's going up into the chat right now.
And this is a document with three pages
and the three pages correspond with the three prompts
that you were considering.
And so what I want you to do is find the page
that has your prompt at the top.
It's set up in table format
so that you can kind of claim a row and do some typing.
So what I'd like you to do is find your page
find a blank row, put your name in the first column
and then your response in the second column.
And then once you've had a chance to respond
in that shared document, I'd like you to go back.
You may not be able to read everybody's comments
but scan through some and in the third column,
there's space for reactions.
And so what I'd like you to do is put an asterisk
next to an idea that you find really effective.
Put a question mark, next to an idea
that you'd like to ask the author more about.
And once folks have had a chance
to participate in the document,
I'm going to identify a couple of those question marks
so that we can have some discussion
about what is in the document.
Before we launch into this,
does anybody have any questions
about what we're doing or how to do what we're doing?
So shared the file in the chat
you should be able to click on it and open it
and you should be able to type into that document.
Please let us know if you have any questions,
raise your hand or just unmute yourself or type in the chat.
Otherwise we will go work in that document
for a few minutes.
I see that there's one question related
to technical difficulties
about what question is being answered.
Antonio, I will send you a one-to-one chat
just so you have that information.
It is displayed on the slides
but I'm not sure if you're able to see that.
And once you've had a chance to respond with your own idea
you can go in and type some peer reactions.
I see we've got some texts, which is great.
Also feel free to use an asterisk
to kind of emphasize something
that you think is a really good idea
or a question mark icon,
if there's something that you might like
to ask the author more about.
Take another minute to scan
through and write your reactions,
I'm scanning through as well.
And we'll pull out a few questions
at the end of that minute.
Okay, this is great.
I love that discussion that's happening in our document.
It's really fun to see how it becomes a space
for conversation, and you all have taken it
to the next level with your comments, I love it.
There's a couple of questions that I want to address.
And the first, if there's a bunch of interests
of element in the activity that you described
about having students read speeches.
Now I'm trying to find where it is.
One second, here it is.
On how students read speeches, speech differences
in different languages than transcribe
the speech of someone from a different language,
learning English then write about it.
I could add some discussion presentations.
I see four question marks about this.
So there's clearly some interest.
Are you willing to talk a little bit more
about that activity?
And maybe also, as you're thinking
about this shift from doing that in-person
to doing that online, what's on your mind.
- So, I'm teaching a phonetics course.
And part of what I try to talk about is
the speech sounds in other languages.
And so the students have to do a project
where they investigate the sounds
and sound structures in other languages.
And then they have to transcribe
the speech of someone that based on the differences
between English and the other language
they have to predict what sounds
would be hard in English for those people
and then they have to transcribe the speech of someone
who speaks at other language speaking English
and see what errors they made
and are those the same errors that they predict.
- And are you, are these videos that you have
where students are making these observations,
what's your source material?
- So in the past, I've paired them up
with an international student, or they also had a choice.
I also talk about child's speech development.
They also had a choice of going and observing in a daycare
and transcribing the speech of a child who was there.
So obviously we can't do in-person this year.
And so I have Guillermo from whose last name I forget
from the TESOL program was kind enough
to send me some videos of some adults
from specific different languages, speaking English
saying the same reading, the same passage.
So this time it will be videos.
- Great, so you found a way to do some adaptation
which also gives you then some content
that you could reuse in future semesters.
That's great folks who put some question marks
what other questions do you have for Shelley about this?
And it seems like it's sparking some ideas
for the rest of you.
Someone willing to raise their hand
and add any questions you may have?
Your questions may have been answered as well.
Okay the next topic that had some questions
was around minute papers
and minute papers are exactly as they found it.
If anyone is curious what they are
that students are given a chance to write
for one minute on a prompt
and this is a way of sort of doing some formative assessment
for both you and for the students.
So it may be a sort of metacognitive prompt
to have students practice we're calling information
or it may be more reflective prompt
as they're thinking about the muddiest point of the class
and the most important learning.
There were some questions about how to ensure
that minute papers don't become a source of anxiety
for students who may have disabilities
that affect sort of processing time
or for international students
who may just need more time to write.
And then there was also a question about grading.
So I'm wondering, I know there was some discussion
about sort of this idea that it should be low stakes.
And if it's done at the end of the class
then if a student isn't quite finished
they might be able to complete on their own.
It's a little less obvious that they're still writing
when other students are not.
But I'm wondering if anyone has
anything that they would like to add
about success with minute papers
or lessons learned from minute papers.
I will be sharing it a little bit at a technique
that's a little bit sort of higher stakes
than minute papers, but includes some reflective
and writing that you all may be interested in.
But I want to start with this minute papers question.
Great, I see a hand up Shelly.
- So I just participated in the alternative grading session
this morning, earlier this morning.
And I haven't used any minute papers before
but it occurred to me
that that could be something that I could make optional.
But if you want specific times
when there would be the option for a minute paper
throughout the class and say if you want an A in the course
you have to do X number of minute papers.
- Great, so sort of quantity of completion
rather than necessarily the like quantity
of what is shared in a single one.
Thanks Shelly.
And don't forget to lower your hand,
so we don't end up with legacy hands.
Similarly, some folks use them
as exit tickets or entrance tickets.
So you could also assign a minute paper
that students bring to class,
which gives them a little bit more time
to write on their own.
But again, you wanna really encourage students.
This is not edited writing, right?
It's just kind of a brain dump for one minute.
Other thoughts on minute papers?
Feel free to raise your hand.
- I just wanted to comment that, I mean I've only done them
in the physical classroom,
but it is definitely more than a minute.
I mean, I just see there's a thing that I have to read
and then they respond to it.
And so why, like when a bunch of people
have started writing, then I set my phone
to like two and a half minutes
and I put it on the display camera
so they can see the time counting down.
And I just collect them at the end of the time.
So, I mean, I thin a minute is really short,
but it also depends on like
what, how much thinking they have to do.
- Great great and there's some discussion in the chat
about using technology to collect those.
So everything from Microsoft has forms
that you could have students submit theirs into
which would collate everything into a spreadsheet,
or if you want to be more formal doing it
in a Blackboard journal, that kind of thing.
Great, Andrea next.
- [Andrea] Yeah, I just wanted to comment
that I find them really useful for figuring out
where maybe I haven't explained something clearly
especially after a lecture.
So I go through them and specifically
I look for like a lot of people
having the same kinds of questions,
but I also find them really, really helpful
when I'm teaching a bunch of people who are online
to get feedback that they're actually engaged
and what they found interesting.
And so that's, it's like we don't get a lot of feedback
and on a lot of times our course even don't come
until maybe month or two later in CALS.
So it's really nice to have that up to the minute.
Oh yeah, okay people are actually enjoying
the stories that I tell
but they're actually making useful points.
Oh, people are actually engaged.
- That's wonderful, yes, exactly.
And that idea of you can vary the prompt, right.
So it can be, what did you find most interesting
versus or what was confusing?
What would you like me to go over next class?
The best advice I can give is
just doing some sort of feedback loop for students.
So once you've collected those minute papers
the next class, you can start by saying
there are a few themes that came through
and I want to address this topic.
And it sounds like people still had some confusion
about so we're going to start by revisiting that
before we launch into the new material that kind of thing.
And Laura Almstead.
- So a couple modified versions
of sort of the minute papers that I've used in a large,
like 200 person class, is simply to have students write
for a minute, right at the beginning of class.
And then I typically ask a question that's related
to what they wrote.
So I don't necessarily collect their writing.
And it's really for their personal benefit.
And they get so used to the fact that,
Hey professor Olmsted asked us to write it down
write something down and she usually asks us a question.
So it sort of motivates them to actually engage in it
and do it and I found that very useful
and feedback from students as it's been helpful.
And then it's technique that I used in actually
an asynchronous online course this summer
was to have students in the Blackboard journal
write three important points from each online video.
And then one thing they found very interesting
and the one thing they found most confusing.
And then I could circle back and either respond to the class
as a whole if there was a common confusion
or respond individually to students.
- Great great, that's really helpful, thank you.
The last question, which is very brief answer
was how did I do this shared document business?
So I'll tell you the easiest way.
Open a word document on your computer.
I love using tables just
'cause I think it keeps it a little bit more organized.
People aren't typing on top of each other.
So I set up the three tables with the three headers,
saved it to my computer and then I uploaded it
to this meeting's chat.
We've been noticing a little funkiness with Teams
that some of these meetings, the chat icon
or the chat field at the bottom in the meeting
is missing the paperclip icon to upload a document.
But there's a little work around,
you don't have to worry about it right now,
but I'll just mention that there's also
you can access the meeting chat
in the main Teams window on the chat
or on menu on the left and right there in that chat
there's another tab called files.
So you can always upload documents there.
If for some reason the paperclip is missing from the chat.
We've also, we're working with ETS to figure out
why it's not showing up for us in these meetings,
but there is a workaround.
Okay, so that's sharing documents.
And once it's shared, then students,
anyone in that meeting has access to that document.
And Maribel I don't know if that works in Zoom.
So that might be a question for the college of medicine.
IT folks, I just am not that familiar
with how the Zoom technology works.
For the sake of time, I'm gonna move us
forward a little bit.
And so want to talk a little bit about
transitioning from the reading to sharing illustrations
of the ways that the three of us who are facilitating,
have implemented the these sort of
pedagogical modes of learning
the information, ideas, experience and reflective dialogue.
And so this is just a little table
and this is actually a snapshot of a bigger table
that I'll be sharing with you
that has some additional ideas
beyond the ones that we're going to illustrate today.
But we wanted to just give you a little bit more information
with some in-depth examples
of how you might do this in an online class.
So with that, I'm going to turn things back
over to Laura Almstead.
And yes, Allison just shared that in the chat.
- So thanks Jen.
So I'm gonna kick off with the first one here
as Jen said, this is a snapshot of that bigger table
and I'm gonna talk a little bit about
the way I use iClicker Reef in my class,
actually both of my classes I taught.
So for those of you who aren't familiar
iClicker Reef is a remote response system
that's similar to iClicker classic
which many people may have used
with the actual physical remote.
And iClicker Reef allows students to submit their responses
to questions during class, either using an app
on their phone or online with a web browser.
So the questions can be multiple choice
but you also have the option for things
like short answer or numeric, and the answers can be scored
in whatever way suits your course goals.
Anything from simply participation to an actual grading
is this answer right or wrong.
And I used it in fall 2020
and two of my classes to achieve a few goals.
First of all, to get feedback on students' understanding.
So immediate feedback and I'd used iClickers
in classes in the past.
And as soon as we transitioned to remote, I was like, okay
I gotta figure out how to do this
'cause this goal is particularly important for me,
especially because I tend to teach
larger classes where you can't necessarily
converse one-on-one with every student.
It also gives students very low stakes
way to practice working with the material
which I also think is important and links back
to Dee Fink's sort of model of thinking about
how you want your learning activities
to be linked to how you want to assess the students.
In terms of specifically remote classes
this helps prevent sort of that screen fade out
as you're listening to the professor
and sort of drifting off, students are now like, okay
I gotta wake up, I gotta do something I gotta respond.
And so it really promotes engagement as well.
It also motivates students to join remote classes
and actually physically be at their computers.
So a couple of examples of how I use this.
So I use it both to sort of get tabs
on how well students were understanding material.
So here's one example that I used in a bio one class,
where they had to select the statements
that correctly compares artificial and natural selection
after a discussion of those two topics.
I also used it to get a baseline
of the classes understanding.
So this was a question that was marked,
as you can see for participation only,
I wanted to see sort how the students interpreted
the term mutation before we talked about it in the context
of information processing and genetics.
In addition to like checking students' knowledge
or getting a baseline understanding,
great thing about iClicker I found
was you can also use it to achieve
multiple other learning goals.
So one thing I used it for right
at the start of the semester was in community building.
So as I mentioned, I taught about by one,
which had nearly 200 students and it's a mixed majors class
so they're from all over the map.
And so I wanted to get a sense of what their major was
so this was a short answer question.
And the great thing about iClicker Reef
is you can actually auto fly, have it create a word cloud.
So I was able to share this word cloud
with my students right in class.
And you can see sort of where they fell in their major.
I also use it frequently for applications.
We show a lot of graphs, talk through a lot of experiments.
So students are asked to analyze data or experiments
come up with controls for analysis and things like that.
And then of course, simply to capture students' attention
either to keep their attention focused on class
or to ask them a really engaging
and thought-provoking question
that gets them thinking about something
and either think about asking a short answer question,
showing a word cloud
and then using that to kick off a class discussion.
So just some take home messages about iClickers
is based on their responses from a feedback survey
I ran in my classes.
Students find iClicker quite effective
at achieving particularly the goal of increasing engagement.
So as you can see, the vast majority said, yes
iClickers increases their engagement during class time
or at least somewhat, very small percentage said no.
And when I asked them whether they would recommend
using iClicker Reef next semester,
overwhelming majority said yes.
And Allison had a similar experience
in her classes where she asked a short answer question,
what's the most effective thing the instructors
do to help you stay engaged during class.
And as you can see iClicker questions
popped up pretty predominantly.
So as I mentioned, the great thing about iClickers
and one benefit in my eyes is that this one technology
allows me to achieve multiple goals.
So in remote learning one thing you want to think
carefully about is you can use
all these different technologies to achieve your goals,
but you gotta be careful about overwhelming students
in terms of sort of tech overload.
And as Jen just posted in the chat,
if you're interested in adopting iClickers,
there is a workshop next week,
so I definitely encourage you to go to that.
With that, I will turn over control.
- All right, thanks.
So let's see.
Okay, so Laura has just told us about using iClicker Reef
and you also saw some examples of using Teams chat
at the beginning of our workshop
as ways that you can create engagement in your class
and then ways that we fit into this mode
of active learning domain of information and ideas
to act as a knowledge check
or identify or activate prior knowledge.
So now we're gonna go a little bit deeper,
both in terms of the level of engagement
within a class session and also the level of engagement
with course material by getting into this domain
of experiential learning.
So I wanna give you an example activity that I use
which is applying information to a problem.
And this activity might be a bit specific for my class
and maybe even a little bit complex.
So I want to start out by saying,
I understand if you don't if this doesn't resonate with you
as something that you can immediately apply in your class
but it has a lot of elements within it
that I think are widely applicable
to different courses and different activities.
So it can include collaborative documents
similar to what you just experienced among others.
So, first I want to give you a little bit
of background about the kinds of assignments
that I'm working with in my class.
And this has come from a shift over a few semesters
in the way that I use assignments in my class.
And basically I got pretty tired
of seeing my own words from slides,
regurgitated back to me on traditional tests.
And so I've shifted away from that
because I really want students to be able to think
about all of the different tools that we've been discussing
and different pieces of information
and be able to identify and apply the best ones
to be able to solve a problem of some kind.
And so students might pick different aggregates
of information or tools to apply to a given problem
that I provide and they might come up with solutions
that look really different but it's that experience
of being able to identify the right information
and describe it appropriately in a given setting
that I really want them to work on.
So my goal is to encourage independent thinking
and application of ideas and tools
that students are learning in the class.
In my class usually takes the form
of being able to design a research experiment
to be able to answer a particular question.
So of course this is a really difficult thing to do
and this is what we do in my upper level classes.
It takes a lot of scaffolding learning the different parts
of the problems and practice.
So this activity that I want to share with you
is the practice that students are getting
before they actually do a real more high stakes assignment
or take home exam.
So this is something that all devote a significant
chunk of class time too.
And the process starts
with me providing them with some kind of problem
a problem that could have multiple approaches
or solutions based on material that they've been learning
either maybe that day in the class session
or within an entire unit or even the entire course.
So this example that I'll give you
is something that students do in a practice session
prior to a take-home exam, where I tell them
that they're going to have a very similar looking question.
So I'll give them this prompt and it's okay
if you can't read this depending on the size of your screen.
I can't read it very well right now
but I just want to guide you through the big ideas.
So there's this big question.
The question here is you want to assess the effects
of remote learning in college students on stress levels.
So that's their big question
that they want to find a solution to given
the information that we've been talking about.
This isn't a physiological psychology class.
So then I give them these sub props
who are your subjects going to be?
What methods will you use?
What are you actually going to measure?
And what kind of results do you expect?
And so they're walked through the process of doing this
and this is similar to what their take home exam question
is going to look like.
So I might present this to them on a slide
so that they can read it
and then spend a few minutes just on their own
digesting all of this information
and thinking back about what they know
what they could actually apply from what they've learned
jotting down a few notes, maybe looking back
at old class notes, to refresh their knowledge
and be able to describe some of that information.
So they spend a few minutes on their own
before they I direct them to join a group
to discuss possible solutions.
So here they'll use a collaborative document
similar to what you just experienced
but this will be in a smaller group setting.
So I direct them to a particular group
and if you're familiar with using Teams for your classes
this probably looks familiar,
in my class I have groups that are together
for the whole semester.
So I can just say, go to your group channel
and they're experienced with that.
But if I didn't use that
I would have a list on a slide of names
for it to go to each particular channel that I've created.
So on the left here
you can see these different group channels.
Group one two, three and so on.
So group one student will go to group one here
and hit that files tab.
And there they'll see the document
that I have uploaded before class time.
So it takes a little bit of preparation
on the instructors part but that document will have
the prompt that I just showed you.
And so now all of the students
within this group are viewing the same document
and can start writing responses there.
But what I really want them to do
is talk about the possibilities and come up
with a best solution that they can together.
So again, within this channel,
they can actually start a meeting
and have a video chat with the whole group
the whole small group there to discuss the possibilities.
So that'll pause them in our main class meeting
while they start this video discussion.
And I'll probably prompt them to say,
each person explain what you thought was the best approach
and then start questioning each other.
Why is one approach better than another
and really get them talking about the material.
So then ultimately they'll come to a consensus
and start writing their response
within the prompt on that shared document.
So now they're getting the experience
of actually answering this question
that's very similar to what they're going to see
on their take home exams soon.
And they're getting the benefit
of other people's perspectives and the discussion
and analysis of these different approaches.
All right, so as with any group activity,
yeah let me respond to this comment here from Robert,
to yes I can join in on the groups one at a time
and discuss with them, or I can ask them to post in the chat
if they have any questions so I can jump into their group.
And we can also have a debrief
with the whole class afterward who had questions about this
what came up, what was surprising and so on.
In my class, these groups are typically five ish.
I think groups of like three to six are really good
for this kind of activity.
So as with most kind of group activities
we might fear that there's the couch potato
just kind of along for the ride
maybe not participating in the discussion or writing any
of the responses in the collaborative document.
So I wanna try to show you a different version
of this that I'll go through kind of quickly
but you can ask any questions if you want to,
to just explain another version
that has more individual accountability.
So here students will individually respond
to an entire prompt.
So in this case, my collaborative document looks different.
I have three separate pages.
And so at any given time
one student is going to be working on the document.
So the first student is going to come in
and type a response to that prompt on the first page.
And then they're gonna go do something else
I'll explain that in a minute.
A second student is now gonna come into the document
and they're going to answer the same prompt,
but on a second page and I have it set up so that they
shouldn't actually even see the other person's response.
So they're on their own generating their own response
to the same prompt.
Then they go onto their next activity.
A third student comes in and this student
is going to read the prior two responses
and then synthesize those on the third page
and do a little bit of analysis.
Which of these approaches is better and why?
And is there anything missing
that these students didn't address
and add that in for feedback?
So now on this document
we have two different responses and a synthesis.
So from the student's perspective
what they're doing is highly directed.
So I'm there telling them at every point, along the way
which document they need to move to
and what they need to be doing
it takes a lot of organization
but a student is going to view one problem
and write a response.
Then they move to another document
where they see a brand new problem and write a response.
Then they move to a third document
where they're seeing the other student's responses
to a third problem that they've never seen before.
So now they're getting experienced
with three different problems.
They've had to write pretty full responses
to two of them and then analyze other student's responses
to a third problem.
So you have all the major elements
of application of material
and then some analysis of what's going on there.
But you're missing a little bit of the discussion
and direct interaction with this method
even though there's more individual accountability.
So there's some trade-offs with these two approaches.
So like I said, I recognize
that this is a pretty specific kind of activity.
So I just want to highlight the different tools
that are used here that might be beneficial for you
in different kinds of environments.
So we're talking about using collaborative documents
and specifically within a small group.
And I've given you now an example
of how you can do this together at the same time
as you experienced in this workshop
or somewhat asynchronously where one person writes something
and then another person comes along
and reads and writes there.
And then we talked about remote group discussion
using the channels in Teams.
And now we have the breakout rooms functions
which functions pretty differently
but that's another option for doing discussion,
which a lot of people might be useful for the people
who mentioned wanting to do think pair share in class.
I think that's gonna be a great tool for you.
And then of course, this uses application
of material and some analysis of both the course material
and other students information.
So I want to pause here
and see if there are any more questions.
We got a few in the chat
but we do have a couple of minutes.
We can take care if you have any more questions about this.
- [Megan] Yeah, how did you make it so that they can not
see what the previous person see their answers?
- Yeah, so it's a little bit on the honor system
but what I do is I have those different prompts set up
on different pages.
And I tell the first round of students,
who's going in write your response on page two.
And so it takes a lot of direction
and I color code everything.
So like you should be seeing red words right now.
And I really direct them to where they should be.
And so I asked the first students
to actually respond on page two
and then for round two I asked students
to go to their next document
and just don't scroll down to page two.
So you're now on page one and now you respond to the prompt.
So I try to make it so that they can easily see
the other person's response
but it is a bit of an honor system.
So Megan, let me know
if that wasn't enough to answer your question
but I'll have these word documents and then upload them
into that files tab on each channel within Teams, perfect.
And then it's more complex with that alternative approach,
because with that there has to be a different document
for each student cause at any given time
there's only one student working on each document.
Okay, I think I will turn it over to Jen
if there aren't any more questions.
I think we'll have time for questions at the end too.
- Thanks, Allison, that was great.
So I'm gonna talk a little bit about a reflective
sort of dialogue process that I use in my teaching.
And it is a weekly end of class reflection.
And you could certainly use a variety of technologies,
Blackboard journals, Teams notes.
You could even just have Blackboard assignments
and where students are uploading documents,
but I'm going to walk you through how I use that
and how it's tied to assessment as well in my class.
So I teach a small interdisciplinary
first semester seminar class
at the community college of Vermont.
And because it's small, I have some luxuries
in how I do this.
I think this could be adapted to larger classes
as well and would love to talk with folks offline
about that and how you might do that.
Especially if you have some TAs that can help you.
So I have students write a weekly end of class reflection.
And my goals of having this as part of the class
are one to promote metacognition
which is actually one of the course objectives of my class.
The second is to help students engage in perspective taking.
And the third is for self-assessment
both informal and formal.
So let me tell you a little bit about the process
and then I'm going to share some examples
of how this shows up.
So students complete in the learning management system
for us at the community college in Vermont,
it's canvas at UVM, it's Blackboard
within 24 hours of the end of the week.
So they have a window of time to do this and it's routine
so they know that they have to do that,
within 24 hours of the of the week ending.
I co-teach this class and so my co-instructor
and I write a strengths-based narrative response
to each student, not long, a few sentences
responding to what they've written.
And then students write in this class
and midterm and end of semester narrative self evaluation
which they have to incorporate aspects
of their weekly reflections.
So this is building towards
a couple of larger reflective exercises.
And this is tiny, I know so I'll read it out loud,
but I have three sort of sets of questions
that students have to answer
as part of this weekly reflection.
And they are essentially the same every week,
I'll make a few tweaks if there's something particularly
different about that week, but in general, they're the same.
So the first question is,
what were your most important learnings
as a result of this week's class?
Please share specific details for instance
what was clarified or what new insights did you gain?
And this one it's pretty open-ended.
And so I spend the first few weeks coaching students
I'm like, give me a little bit more here,
or I really liked what you said,
but I'd like to know a little bit more about this.
But it's intentionally open-ended because I want to know
where students learn something
and I'm often surprised they learned something
from a classmate in a small group that was really,
some integral for them, but I didn't even observe it.
So it's nice 'cause I get a little bit
of a kind of insight into their world.
The second question I list the essential objectives
or the learning objectives for the class.
And then I ask students to please share an example
of how you moved closer to mastery of one or more
of these essential objectives as a result
of this week's homework and our class,
and tell us which essential objectives you're discussing
explain how you think the growth in knowledge skills
or attitude will benefit you in college
and work and relationships in life.
And so again, it's open-ended.
I have in my syllabus, I've linked this week
we're talking about this, which links to this objective
but students often make connections
to objectives that weren't in my mind
when I'm designing that week.
And so it's really interesting to see
what students are responding to.
And then the third gives them four prompts to choose from.
So students are required to respond to at least one
they can do more if they want to.
And they write three to five sentences in response
to the prompt and providing enough detail
for myself and my co-instructor
to better understand their ideas.
So the first is one insight I had related to the class
including the physical class this week,
our time together, but I didn't get to share
was so an insight they didn't get to share
because of this week's assignments and our class.
I'm still thinking about or wondering about
or want to know more about.
So that's often where students express some confusion
that they might not have expressed at the end of class.
When I say, does anybody have any questions?
Sometimes they're embarrassed or not quite sure
this gives them a little space to think about
what their thinking is.
One connection I made as a result of this week's assignment
and our class is, and then if I could talk to anyone
about something that came up in class this week
it would be please tell us who you would talk with
what you would share with them
and why you think they would find it interesting
and or helpful or provocative.
And so these have a three questions
that students respond to every week
and I'm giving you, I'm gonna share
in the next three slides, some examples of, yes, Elizabeth
I'm happy to share this.
I'll share the slides afterwards
but I wanted to share with you some examples
of the kinds of responses that we get.
Not because you need to know what's happening in class
but just to get a sense of the depth that is pretty common.
And so sometimes the responses are content oriented
and all of these examples are related
to a unit where we're reading a non-fiction text.
And so in this case the student gained
a better understanding about consent
as a result of the class
because of some conversation with peers and with the class
and that they're interested to see how laws
and requirements will change over the years.
The second is a skills oriented reflection.
So I was pretty bad at procrastinating
over the course of the book,
the student made some adjustments
and by the last set of chapters,
they did it over the course of the week
and found it wasn't as stressful
and that they're getting better at managing time
and setting goals and making those goals work for them
related to their homework.
And then a third example is values oriented.
This is a student who's thinking
about the content of the class,
but thinking about sort of morality related
to the content of the class and that the reflections
that humans were usually quick to say what we do
but the truth is it isn't as always as easy
which is why I tried to put myself in other person's shoes.
And so I'm giving an example of how that showed up
for them as they were reading a chapter.
And so you can get a sense of kind of how
these prompts lead students to do some reflection.
And then I spend a few minutes
and write a strengths-based response.
So I might pull out, like I noticed this
that you did this thing in class
and it was really useful related
to this idea that you're bringing in.
Thank you, do more of that
or I'm glad that you're exploring this question.
What about if we took it a step further
and went in this direction?
So it's a way to actually have a little bit
of a reflective dialogue with me
because not only of the students writing,
I'm writing back to them and then in the midterm
and the final, where they write a longer narrative
of kind of their progress they're responding
to those responses that my constructor
and I have written to them.
So I really liked this idea of weekly reflections.
Obviously the size of the class is gonna impact
how you might implement this.
And I've actually used this in a variety of ways.
So students can actually self-assign participation grades
using weekly reflection and a scoring rubric.
I've done that in the past.
I have shifted to contracts and specs grading.
And so I don't actually assign grades or points
but if students do a good faith effort
at completing this weekly assessment
then they earn engagement credits,
which contributes to earning and like a plus or minus
on their final grade.
And then I'm thinking about moving in the future
to an ungraded process where students are fully
self assessing their grades.
I think weekly reflections
would be an absolutely integral part of that.
So you can think that there's a variety of ways
to kind of tie this to assessment.
And I think if you have TAs, this is a great place
for TAs and students to be engaging with one another.
So that is the conclusion of that.
Still a little mini presentation
of talking about reflection, happy to take questions.
Although I think probably this felt pretty straightforward.
So I'll pause for a minute, see if there are questions
and then otherwise I'm going to turn it
back over to Allison.
- All right, so we want to spend the rest of our time
just figuring out what works for you.
And so if you haven't already, please look at that chart
that I posted back in the chat, maybe I'll repost it.
So it's fresh here.
I dunno if I can do that since I've already uploaded it so--
- I can grab a link to it and make sure
they would get a copy of that.
- Okay thanks. - Yep.
- Okay so there's a full chart of many different activities.
We've shown you examples of one activity
in each of those three domains.
So we want you to be able to identify at least
one activity that you think will work for you.
So maybe it is from that domain of information and ideas.
Maybe it's about experiential learning,
or maybe it's about reflective dialogue.
But as you look at that chart
and identify activity that will work for you,
note which of these categories it comes into.
And in a moment, we'll ask you to post in the chat
about which activity is going to work for you.
We'll do this in rounds by each category.
So first we'll ask people who identify
an activity in the domain of information
and ideas to post in the chat
if you wanted to start drafting something.
Any activity that you want to post is great
and if you want to explain a little bit
about how it connects to your course,
that might be great for us to see
how you are actually going to apply it.
So I'll give you a minute in silence
to just actually look through that chart and read.
All right so hopefully you've had a minute to identify
one activity that you think will work for your course
and noted which category that fits into.
If you have one that fits into that information
and ideas domain, go ahead and join Mary Val
in posting in the chat, what activity that is.
Great, so we're seeing a variety of techniques
that we talked about and also some new ideas coming up
like using the discussion forum before class
and then talking about specific points during class.
Yeah, I like that.
That's when I'm gonna be using.
Okay, feel free to keep them coming if you haven't submitted
but we'll go ahead and move on to the next domain.
So if you had an activity that works under
the category of experience, please post that in the chat.
Great, there's a big variety here, that's great.
And so there's everything from using specific documents
to presentations, to discussions, yeah.
All right, glad that's resonating.
Yeah and I'm happy to talk more about
some of those specific logistics Antonio, if you want to
or share the slides that I use for prompts.
Yeah, okay let's get to our last domain
and then we'll have a few minutes left for questions
about what anyone's posting or anything else here too.
So anyone who has a reflective dialogue activity
that they think they'll be using, tell us what you think.
All right seems like this minute papers
are the hot topic for today.
Yeah and the icebreakers, I think they're so important.
And we've heard a lot of reflections from students
that can be anything community building,
especially in the remote environment is really critical
for their wellbeing, but also just for feeling engaged
in the class.
Great I'm seeing applying that in different settings,
like in a clinical setting, that's a great idea.
Great, okay.
So if we have our last few minutes for any questions
you can type into the chat or turn your microphone on.
And we have a couple of announcements.
I might actually ask Jen to make the announcements
as since I'm not sure I can remember everything.
- Indeed, so the first is that we are asking folks
to take a few minutes at the end of each workshop
to fill out an evaluation just so that we have slightly
sort of broader responses which helps us formulate
our workshops when we repeat them
this was a first time out of the gate.
So thank you for your extra attention to feedback.
I'll post that in the chat in just a second.
And then I think our other announcements were mostly
about workshops which are upcoming.
And I think that we've posted those in the chat.
So there's some iClicker workshop,
Teams breakout rooms which Allison mentioned
as a new feature in Teams.
So feel free to sign up for additional workshops
and then finally consultations.
So as staff and faculty associates
we are available to you for consultations.
So if you have something that you're kind of mulling over
and you want some additional perspective on
we are here to help you.
- And then one more note, I just uploaded into the chat
a second table, which has a lot of same information,
but It's organized differently
as a list of the different technological tools
you might either have or be interested in using.
And then what activities you can use
to go along with that particular tool.
So it's sort of a reverse of the table that we've given you.
And it has links to workshops
including the yellow dig workshop
which Megan asked about in the chat.
So all of the workshops that are being offered
in January and our open hours as well
where you can just drop in with specific questions.
And I think there's a hand up, see Sarah.
- [Sarah] Yeah my question is like, all these things
are like these things they seem to be really text-based
and I just, probably the answer is there aren't
but I just wonder if there's ways that,
you could get students to draw something
because that's what they would be doing in class.
They would draw graphs.
- Yeah I asked students to draw things quite often
and and just do that on their own.
I can't see what they're drawing necessarily
but there is also the whiteboard function in Teams.
You can use that as a collaborative document
where people can draw in that.
We don't normally use that for the whiteboard function
as an instructor because it doesn't fit in,
it doesn't get recorded with our class session
but it is very useful as a just class--
- [Sarah] Have you had students in channels
they could each have a whiteboard?
- I'm not sure, Jen, do you know about that or anybody else?
- Yeah, so couple of things,
so on each meeting has a whiteboard
and so yes in those channels.
The other thing is the whiteboard
kind of lives outside of Teams
so I always go to office.microsoft.com.
Once I log in with my credentials
I have access to all the applications
and whiteboard is one of those applications.
So you can also actually create
kind of distinct whiteboards,
just like sort of like I did with a word document, right?
Like it's sort of separate word documents
that you then link into the meeting.
And so there's a variety of ways
to use multiple whiteboards in one class.
- Wondering with that is students would need a device
in which they could actually draw on their screen--
- Use it with a mouse and (mumbles).
- You wanna have them draw.
One thing I used actually, but it was for assignments
in a lab course is to ask students to draw something
and then take a picture and upload it
with their assignment or a piece of this picture
and a word doc that they could convert to PDFs,
which upload pretty easily.
- [Sarah] Yeah I kind of agree in trainings
but not as part of like a class session.
I just, yeah, but yeah, that's great.
I'll think about those, thank you.
- Any other last questions before we go?
All right thank you all.
It's really nice to see you
and hear all of your new ideas indeed
and I'll be sending out materials
including our shared document
'cause I think there were some good ideas
in there that you might wanna approach from a colleague,
as well as our slides
that you've got all of this information.