Ken Bain – Page 2 – Science Edventures

No matter what course you teach, one of your course-level learning outcomes should be that students will think more like experts in your field. They won’t be experts yet, not after one course or even an undergraduate degree, but they can think in more expert-like ways.

How do experts think?

According to How People Learn, experts must

have a deep foundation of factual knowledge
understand those facts and concepts in a conceptual framework
organize the knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application

Here’s how I picture that conceptual framework:

Novice	Expert

It’s not enough just to teach the factual knowledge: you also have to help students build the conceptual framework and give them practice retrieving and applying the facts and concepts:

Factual knowledge	Conceptual framework	Retrieval

(My thanks to Kimberly Tanner at San Francisco State University for reminding me that anyone can memorize a bunch of facts; expertise lies in the conceptual framework and retrieval.)

What does your classroom look like?

Yes, let’s support expert-like thinking and behavior. But how do you do it? I think Ken Bain, in What the best college teachers do (2004), describes it perfectly:

More than anything else, the best teachers try to create a natural critical learning environment: natural because students encounter skills, habits, attitudes, and information they are trying to learn embedded in questions and tasks they find fascinating—authentic tasks that arouse curiosity and become intrinsically interesting; critical because students learn to think critically, to reason from evidence, to examine the quality of their reasoning using a variety of intellectual standards, to make improvements while thinking, and to ask probing and insightful questions about the thinking of other people.

The big idea, then, is to pick instructional strategies that give students practice thinking like experts, in a natural and authentic way.

The Slippery Slope to Peer Instruction

My colleague Beth Simon and I have come up with a strategy we call, “The Slippery Slope to Peer Instruction.”

2-minute pause: The 2-minute pause procedure is really easy to implement in a class because you literally don’t do anything. Every 15 or 20 minutes of lecture, when you sense your students’ brains are full, you stop lecturing and invite the students to take 2 minutes to

review their notes
consult with neighbors to fill in missing points
check with neighbors if anything is confusing
formulate a question(s) that will clear up confusion or fill in a gap (this is very expert-like behavior!)

When conversations dies down (wait longer than 2 minutes if there’s good stuff happening) lead a brief, class-wide discussion to answer questions and resolve confusion. They’ll probably have questions you haven’t thought about (because if you did think about them, you’d have covered it in the lecture.) Answer by “thinking-aloud”, that is, sharing aloud that voice in your head as you figure it out. When everyone is back up-up-to-speed and has had a chance to hang some knowledge on their conceptual framework, you can pick up where you left off.

2-minute pause Pro™: Maybe when you pause, your students

aren’t confused
don’t have anything to talk about
don’t know how to have expert-like conversions

Then “seed” the pause with a question. You could get them to reconsider what you’ve just covered:

Okay, everyone, that’s a lot to think about. Take 2 minutes to look over your notes. If you’re confused about something, check with your neighbors. If everything’s okay, think about this: what do you suppose would happen if they run that experiment with adults instead of children?

Or prime them for what’s coming:

Okay, everyone, that’s a lot to think about. Take 2 minutes to look over your notes. If you’re confused about something, check with your neighbors. If everything’s okay, think about this: How do you think this result will change when we apply it in 3 dimensions instead of 2?

Peer Instruction: Don’t just stop lecturing and don’t just seed the discussion with an interesting question. Direct the discussion between students by giving them a few conversation starters. That is, ask a conceptually-challenging, multiple choice question with choices that activate expert-like thinking and/or common misconceptions. Here’s one of my favorites, from an introductory #astro101 class

How many of these are reasons for the season?

the height of the Sun in the sky during the day

Earth’s distance from the Sun

how many hours the Sun is up each day

one of them

two

all three

I like this question because it activates a strong misconception (that the seasons are due to Earth’s distance from the Sun) and it requires students to think and talk like astronomers.

“Requires?”

Yes, requires! Even if every single student correctly chooses B, the instructor can drive the next few minutes of astro-goodness with, “Excellent. Which two?!”

You’re only a 2-minute pause away from peer instruction

That’s our “slippery slope” strategy. Instructors looking to move away from traditional lecture are often reluctant to jump right to peer instruction, citing the technical overhead — software and hardware — and the cost to students for clickers. What could be easier than a 2-minute pause, though? It gives instructors a taste of the incredible feedback and interaction that students will contribute, given the chance. After that, it’s just baby steps to seeding the discussion and then driving the conversations.

Acquiring knowledge. Attaching it to a framework. Retrieving it to support discussion. In my book, that’s expert-like thinking.

(This post is adapted from a post I wrote for UCSD’s Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars program)

I spend a lot of time thinking about how and why peer instruction works and helping instructors improve their technique. The other day, I had an experience that crystallized for me the difference between peer instruction and students merely clicking their clickers.

The instructor I was observing, who gave me permission to tell this story, was teaching a political science class about gender and politics. During the class, she asked a clicker question something like this:

Where does the US rank in the world when it comes to
the percentage of women in elected positions?
A) 12th
B) 34th
C) 78th
D) 112th

Here’s what was supposed to happen…

The students would vote. Then they’d “turn to your neighbors and convince them you’re right.” The students would help each other remember the correct answer, 78th, and then spontaneously launch into a discussion about how that’s surprising because of ABC and interesting because it’s DEF but not GHI and so on, bringing in all the interesting, conceptually challenging ideas that political scientists explore and debate.

That’s not what happened, though. Sure, they voted. The even split across all four answers showed they didn’t know the answer and were guessing. And when she asked them to turn to their neighbors, the room didn’t crescendo with conversation. There was some brief murmuring

“What’d you pick?”
“78th.”
“Huh. I picked 34th.”

And that was it. There was no interest, no conversation, no debate.

The problem, I think, was not with the students but with the question. It didn’t require students to confront their understanding, take a stance and be prepared to defend it. It simply required them to remember some fact from some book somewhere. In other words, just the kind of low-level knowledge we often scoff at when we say, “Oh, this course isn’t about fact and memorization. No, this course is about gathering evidence to form and then defend arguments.” Not to pick on the Humanities, I often hear from STEM instructors, “…No, this course is about problem-solving and applying the theory to real world applications.”

Here’s a better clicker question:

The US ranks 78th in the world when it comes to the percentage of women
in elected positions. In your opinion, why is this surprising?

A) Because it shows ABC
B) Because it’s an example of DEF
C) Because it contradicts GHI
D) Something else

The fact that requires memorization? Just give it to them. Most importantly, seed the conversation with the concepts you want them to grapple with. They’re not expert enough, not yet, to spontaneously come up with ABC, DEF and GHI, so spark the conversation, especially if one of the choices is a common misconception that needs confronting.

With a question like this, and effective peer instruction “choreography”, the students first do a solo vote where they have to decide, each in their own heads, what they believe about the concept. This solo vote is critical because it prepares them to contribute to the discussion with their peers that follows. For 30 seconds or a minute, the room will be filled with political scientists. Or at least, students practicing to become political scientists, getting immediate feedback from their peers and the instructor. That’s what peer instruction is about.

[Update Jul 5, 2013] One of my Summer projects is (finally) reading Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do. In summarizing how the best college teachers conduct their classes, Bain describes the “natural critical learning environment”

More than anything else, the best teachers try to create a natural critical learning environment: “natural” because students encounter the skills, habits, attitudes, and information they are trying to learn embedded in questions and tasks they find fascinating — authentic tasks that arouse curiosity and become intrinsically interesting; “critical” because students learn to think critically, to reason from evidence, to examine the quality of their reasoning using a variety of intellectual standards, to make improvements while thinking, and to ask probing and insightful questions about the thinking of other people. (p. 99)

Where I see the clearest connection with the questions used in peer instruction is one of the characteristics of a natural critical learning environment”

[T]he natural critical learning environment also encourages students in some higher-order intellectual activity: encouraging them to compare, apply, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize, but never only to listen and remember. Often that means asking students to make and defend judgments and them providing them with some basis for making the decision. (p. 102)

The original peer instruction question, “Where does the US rank in the world…” asks students only to remember. A good peer instruction question (and a well-choreographed episode of peer instruction) forces students climb higher into Blooms’s taxonomy.

You’re only a 2-minute pause away from peer instruction

How do experts think?

What does your classroom look like?

The Slippery Slope to Peer Instruction

You’re only a 2-minute pause away from peer instruction

If you want them to think like experts…

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