Teaching students to think like experts – CSUgrit Symposium

I have the pleasure of facilitating a pre-conference workshop at the Cal State University LA Symposium on University Teaching. My thanks to Beverly Bondad-Brown, Cat Haras, and Adrienne Lopez at CSULA’s Center for Effective Teaching and Learning.

I’ll be talking about how to get your students thinking in expert-like ways by using peer instruction (“clickers”). Peer instruction is a powerful, versatile, evidence-based instructional strategy that lets you turn your classroom into, as Ken Bain says in What the best college teachers do, (2004) a place where “students encounter safe yet challenging conditions in which they can try, fail, receive feedback, and try again without facing a summative evaluation.” (p. 108)

Workshop Resources

• Here’s a summary (PDF) of the key findings from How People Learn
• This is a collection of peer instruction questions to critique during the workshop. Watch out – some of these are good and some are bad!

• Here are the workshop slides.