Tag: mindset

Clicker points and mindset

peer instruction No Comments

I’m a big fan of peer instruction with clickers and of Carol Dweck’s model of growth and fixed mindset. The streams crossed the other day which can be both revealing (and dangerous.)

If you’re familiar with peer instruction and mindset, skip down to “Clicker points: performance or participation.” If you’re still here, a quick refresher:

(Image: Peter Newbury CC-BY)
(Image: Peter Newbury CC-BY)

Peer instruction is a powerful, evidence-based instructional strategy where the instructor poses a conceptually-challenging multiple-choice question, the students vote using “clickers”, discuss their thinking with their neighbors, vote again (depending on the type of question asked) and then participate in a class-wide discussion.

Carol Dweck’s model of mindset suggests there are two attitudes, or mindsets, we have towards our own ability to learn: fixed and growth. Earlier versions of her model had various terms for what eventually become fixed and growth:

fixed: entity, helpless, performance-oriented

growth: incremental, malleable, mastery-oriented

This infographic by Nigel Holmes gives an excellent description and comparison of fixed and growth:

Our attitudes or “mindset” toward our own learning determines our behavior (and success).
Infographic by Nigel Holmes.

Clicker points: performance or participation

One of the benefits of using clickers to facilitate peer instruction is the hardware and software lets you track who clicked and what they clicked because every i>clicker (that’s what we use at UC San Diego and other audience response systems can do this, too)  has a unique ID. After it’s set up and talking to your learning management system, when a student clicks, you can track it student-by-student and click-by-click.

Why would you want to track it, anyway?

The short answer is, so students can accumulate points that contribute to their course grade. The question is, what do they get points for:  for clicking anything (participation), for getting the questions correct (performance), or a combination?

It is generally recommended that students receive PARTICIPATION points for peer instruction questions. Assigning points for PERFORMANCE, that is, getting the questions correct, has been shown to hinder conversations (here’s an example in Physics) because students worry about “getting it right” rather than recognizing what they know/believe about the concept. Plus, many good peer instruction questions have more than one correct answer and the goal is getting students to talk about one of the choices.

Here’s where I see growth and fixed mindset coming in. Some of your students will already have a growth mindset about the concepts you’re teaching

Yes, I can learn this is. It might not be easy but I can do it.

Some of your student will have a fixed mindset about your course

I’m not good at this stuff. This course is going to hard.

And some of your students will have no mindset about your course. They’ve never even heard of transpolymerization or intersectionality or traxoline, let alone whether or not they think they can learn it.

Traxo-what?

Because of the success a growth mindset can bring, I say we do everything we can to spark and foster a growth mindset in our students and make them confident they can learn. And that confidence is fragile: it only takes being shut down by your professor once for asking a question in class to never ask another question in class. It only takes one hurtful comment on an essay to never stray beyond 5 paragraphs again. It only takes once getting the clicker questions wrong and receiving nothing to sit next to Mr. Smarty-pants next time and just do what he does.

Fostering a growth mindset is hard but you can do it* by how you create a supportive learning environment in class, how you respect all your students, how you show your appreciation for every contribution a student makes to class,  and how you reward your students for participating in peer instruction.

*Oooo, growth mindset about growth mindset!

How many performance points?

The i>clicker software has a 2 options for giving participation points:

Option 1: students receive 1 point per class if they answer almost all of the questions (“almost all” is good practice because you don’t want a student to get zero if they happen to miss clicking once during the class.) You specify the “almost all” threshold in the i>clicker settings.

Option 2: students receive 1 point every time they click.

Personally, I like Option 2 because on really busy days where students vote and revote on several peer instruction questions, they’re rewarded with a lot of points, compared to the slower days where they only had to answer 1 peer instruction question.

If you’re going to give points, you need to build it into the syllabus — it’s got to be worth something. I’ve seen instructors assign as little as 2% for peer instruction (too low, in my opinion) and as high as 20% when participation in the clicker-driven class discussion was really important. If you’re not sure, 5-10% is a good range, but call it “class participation” rather than “clicker points” to give yourself some flexibility to do other collaborative activities in class, too.

There will be times when a student does not click: he was sick that day; she didn’t click before you closed the poll; his clicker batteries died halfway through class; she left her clicker at home. You don’t want these students swarming you at the end of class. So build a “get out of jail free” clause into your syllabus, with a policy like this:

To receive full marks on this component of the class, you only need to participate 80% [you set this threshold in your syllabus] of the time. That is, you can miss an occasional click and still receive full marks.

At the end of the course, you’ll have to do a little calculation to figure out their clicker scores but that’s a small price to pay for removing all the stress and anxiety students might feel.

tl;dr

Support a growth mindset in your students with participation points for peer instruction to reward them for practicing thinking in expert-like ways. There are plenty of other components of the course to assess their performance. Let peer instruction be about practice, formative feedback, and their realization they CAN do this, after all.

Learn your students’ names. No, really.

teaching UCSD 4 Comments

I have a thing about learning my students’ names. And it’s not a good thing.

I think I have a fixed mindset when it comes to learning people’s names: I believe I can’t do it. So whenever someone introduces him- or herself, a piece of my brain shuts off for a couple of seconds and the name go in one ear and out the other. That’s really annoying when I can’t call them by name just 5 seconds later!

The first step is admitting I have a problem, right? These days, I deliberately “activate” my brain when I’m about to meet someone: Okay, here comes somebody new. Listen for their name. Listen…listen…listen…got it! “Nice to meet you, [insert name here]”

Of course, I ignore all this advice when it comes to students in my classes. I used to teach introductory astronomy with 200-300 students. I mean, c’mon, what am I supposed to do, learn all their names? Bah, forget about it.

A Critical Moment

Then something happened last summer. I was observing a class at UCSD taught by one of our Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars — Ph.D. students selected to teach a course in Summer Session  with support from the Center for Teaching Development. David was teaching an anthropology class about multiculturalism to about 50 students. His goal was to regularly spark discussion in class, getting students to share their own diverse cultural experiences. At first, David easily called on about half a dozen students by name, most of whom sat near the front of the room. “Uh-oh,” I thought to myself, “he knows the names of the enthusiastic students, potentially excluding the others from the ‘teacher’s pet’ club.” Someone else put up a hand and then David did something that still sticks in my memory: he looked right at the student, said, “Yes…uhhh…” and looked down at his classlist with student photos and names, found the right person, “…John*, what would like to add?” [*it wasn’t John, I don’t think. I wasn’t listening. See above.] David made it clear he wanted to learn their names and they saw the effort he was putting into it. Later in the same class, he called on someone at the back of the room, by name, who he remembered had written something about the event they were discussing.

Even though the room was narrow and dark, with the studnets on one end and David on the other, it felt like a community. They were all  learning together. People engaged all over the room, not just the front rows. Wow. I believe that David knowing his students’ names was a critical factor in that success.

Fall 2013 – My Turn

When it was my turn to teach again, a class for 40 grad students and postdocs about teaching and learning in higher ed, I vowed to learn their names. I made a print-out of their names and photos (pro tip: alphabetized by first name). When they were working in small groups, I took the time to deliberately look at each student and recall his or her name, consulting my cheat sheet only when necessary. Honestly, it didn’t take long before I was comfortable calling them by name. And it was great, especially since I was able to link their blog posts with their faces and could say, “Amy, you wrote about that on the blog. Could you share what you wrote with us?”

Winter 2014

I’m about to teach this same class again, this time with 64 students. As I spent a precious holiday afternoon sitting at my computer downloading and formatting students pictures into a class list, I wondered if it was really worth the effort. Wondered on Twitter, that is:

 

What a thrill to open Twitter a few hours later and see my timeline full of responses. Almost everyone agreed that it’s crucial but more difficult to accomplish, the larger the class:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some were clear that it’s not easy in really large classes:

 

  On the other hand, class size doesn’t bother @raulpacheco:

 

  @bfwriter noticed that @kellecruz says she learns the names of her engaged students:

To which Kelle elaborated

 

 

 

The last words, for now, go to @ProfNoodlearms for viewing name-learning as a consequence, not a catalyst, of learning

…and to @DRPicardHIS for using names to build these connections amongst the students, too:

 

Is it worth the effort?

In a word, yes. Learn as many names as you can. Even if you only learn half of them, it may seem to the students that you know them all. And that feeling of connection and community might be enough to get all of your students engaged and learning.

How do YOU do it?

Do you learn your students’ names? If you have a good method, would you leave a comment to share it with us? Thanks!

Update: January 24, 2014

Writing this post motivated me to learn my students’ names, all 60 of them. I made a PPT deck with 1 slide for each student’s name, program (“grad student, Biology”) and photo. I printed these slides as 9-up handouts and cut them, to get a stack of index cards I carry around and continually flip through. I worked hard at it and within a few days, I could name each student.

I mades cards, one for each student, giving their names, programs and pictures.
I mades cards, one for each student, giving their names, programs and pictures.

I’ve been teaching my class for 3 weeks now and knowing my students’ names and faces is working great in both directions, faces-to-names and names-to-faces:

  • when a student walks into the classroom, I can say, “Hi, Bob. How’s your week going?”
  • when a student asks a question or makes a comment, I can say, “Yes, Bob, you’ve got something to add?” and “Thanks, Bob, that’s really interesting.”
  • when they write blog posts (and they wrote some good ones), I read the author name, and picture the student in my head. Later, when I see that student in class, I can say, “Great post, Bob, I really like how you wrote…”
  • similarly, when I’m teaching and remember something relevant that I read in a blog post, I can look around the room and say, “Bob, you wrote about that. Would you tell us about it?”

On the first day, I’d see them coming up the hallway to class and could have said, “Hi Bob, great to meet you in person.” That felt a little creepy because we’d never met. Instead, I stuck out my hand, “Hi, I’m Peter” and then listened very deliberately to make sure the name they replied with matched what I was expecting. That gave me a way to check the pronounciation, too.

The students sit in 3’s and 4’s at tables in my classroom and I notice they often introduce themselves when they do group work. As Danielle writes in the comments, the students benefit from knowing each other’s names, too.

Update: February 21, 2014

“Oh sure, I learned their names,” I convinced myself. I stopped quizzing myself with my stack of index cards. And the next week, drew a blank on student after student! I guess it’s no surprise I’d forget the names of people I see only once per week in a group of 20 but it’s really frustrating to forget students’ names when you know you knew them.

So, I’m back to quizzing myself with the index cards. Before each class, I flip through the cards, slipping the ones I get wrong back into the deck. Seems to be working because this week, I didn’t make any mistakes.

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