AY 300 - Fall 2011: Third Day Lesson Plan

Today's class will discuss ethics, continue talking about good lecturing and board work techniques, and effective group strategies.

• Review the ethics policies of UC Berkeley.
• Understand the role of group work versus lecturing.
• Review the role of TALC, The Astronomy Learning Center.
• Continue practicing good board work technique.

Ask everyone to write down their section times, so the instructors know.

The person on call for this week will share their section experience. Some questions include:

• What did you do?
• How did you implement your activities?
• What worked?
• What didn't work?
• What would you do differently?
• How did you assess learning?
• Did you receive any unexpected questions/reactions/etc.?
• Did anything unexpected happen?
• What were you thinking about while you were running section? Any moments of panic?

During this (and after), open the floor up for general questions and sharing about how sections are going. We will do this every week for the rest of the semester.

Therese, you said you had some ideas for this. How about you take the lead.

Cover the main points of TALC: what to do, what not to do, common pitfalls, it's easy to be lazy and destroy the effectiveness of TALC, etc.

History of TALC:

• TALC was designed to be a great place for all of this “peer learning” stuff to happen.
• Founded by JohnJohn; has been rolling for many years
• Now incorporated into the syllabi of almost all intro classes (majors and nonmajors)

Rules of TALC:

1. GSIs DON'T give out answers.
   • This is rule #1 for a reason.
   • Students will try and bend it. (“I know you can't give me the answer, but can you tell me if this makes any sense?”) Use the same strategy right back at them.
2. GSIs won't look at your paper.
   • Crystal-clear: there should never be any exceptions to this, ever.
   • Feel free to ask the student to come to the board and work out their steps. But have them leave the homework at home. If they get the same answer… they'll probably realize they didn't even need you!
3. Board work gets PRIORITY help.
   • Always encourage use of the board.
4. NO COPYING: Homework must be written up independently.
   • Scan the room and constantly erase any completed problems.
   • Get those pens and paper away from the boards!
5. TALC Tax: Getting help from a GSI means that you be asked to give help to other students.
6. GSI busy? Ask students.
   • Remember who did what problem, and point students to each other if someone is curious about an old problem.

TALC tips:

• Read The Tao of TALC
• Entry - Evans is locked after hours! Make sure your ID card is coded and have a system going to be sure students know how to let each other in. Make sure that the second floor is not locked (it keeps changing). If it is, let us (and your Head GSI) know.
• TALC operates best above a critical mass of students, so definitely encourage your students to come!
• It can (and often does) happen that you're just not needed some of the time. Try to find ways to pass the time, but make sure that students will feel comfortable disturbing you to ask for help. (I.e, don't get engrossed in a crossword puzzle or whatever and tune out the students. Your job is to be as helpful to the students as possible, and boredom is not an excuse for not doing your job.) But if the students are all working well without your assistance, don't go around distracting them.
• With that said, it can be a good idea to kinda quietly wander around the room from group to group every once in awhile and try to eavesdrop. If you hear something really good, praise the student, if you hear something totally wrong, try to ask a question that will make the student confront the information that's incorrect.
• You should pretty much never be working on stuff that's not related to the course you're teaching in TALC.

What NOT to do in TALC:

• Talk to a student individually if it can ever be avoided
• Sit down with a student or group
• Write on the board (except very minimally, i.e. start a sketch, then ask a student to finish)
• Leave stuff on the board
• Look at a students' paper or distribute/check answers.
• Anything that's more appropriate for office hours.

Dealing with problem students (and GSIs):

• Point to the rules!
• In the past, some non-300 GSIs have been unaware of the TALC rules and have not followed them. Please approach them about this immediately as it sets a devastating precedent. If this behavior persists, you must report them to your Head GSI or else all of TALC completely falls apart.

Abuse of TALC / cheating:

• Make it clear to students the line between collaborative learning and cheating. 'Too much' help will be considered cheating and dealt with as such!
• Strategies to stop it
  • Be very clear early. Students will help uphold the law for you if they know you're serious about it.
  • Force students to write on the board. Make them earn their help.
  • NO pens/paper while working at the board … just watch and learn.
  • Erase immediately. If they protest, offer a marker and have the student step through with your help. Keep an eraser with you at all times and be at the ready to erase a group's work after they've finished a problem and explained it to you and you're convinced that just about everyone in the group understands what's going on.
  • Force small groups, but watch for pair-to-pair copying.

Examples:

• Student approaches you with his/her assignment asking you to check the answer.
• While working out the problem, student at table is clearly copying.
• Once the problem has been solved as a group at the board, what now?
• A few minutes later, another student/group is seen working on the board at the same problem.

Copies of handouts:

• Pass out a TALC handout and a copy of the Tao of TALC.

Run through a variety of group work strategies that can be used in section. Main things to comment on:

1. Be sure to introduce the activity with crystal clear instructions. Ambiguity leads to either poor group work or individuals going off and doing their thing.
2. The quality of the group work depends sensitively on the activity and questions asked. In this respect, I think all the worksheets on the EBRB need a considerable overhaul. I (Aaron) would like us to push for more open-ended questions and questions that actually involve group discussion. The focus on problem solving results in individual working; new strategies are needed for this, like
   1. Only hand out one worksheet per group.
   2. Have the students write their answers on a large sheet of paper, work entirely at one of the whiteboards, or have some sort of whiteboard at each table (I'm working on this…).
   3. Anything else?

Suggestions to your students (adapted from McKeachie):

1. Be sure everyone contributes to discussions and to tasks.
2. Don't jump to conclusions too quickly. Be sure that minority ideas are considered.
3. Don't assume consensus because no one has opposed an idea of offered an alternative. Check agreement with each group member verbally, not just by a vote.
4. Set goals—immediate, intermediate, and long-term—but don't be afraid to change them as you progress. (These should be obvious in sections.)
5. For bigger multi-part tasks: Allocate tasks to be done. Be sure that each person knows what he or she is to do. Check this before beginning.

With that said, of course it is possible to mix and match styles! Examples:

• The Interactive Lecture
  • Like group work but the whole class is one big group you're a group member!
  • Can be used with worksheets and/or demos (often with well-defined fill-in-the-blank questions).
  • Continuously call on a variety of students to explain answers.
  • This style tends to keep all students engaged and on task.

• The Choreographed Group Task
  • e.g., Start off doing problems 1 and 2 at the board (with varying amounts of help/feedback from students). Then have students do 3 and 4 in groups. Do 5 at the board by Q and A, taking responses from the class for each step. Then call on a volunteer to explain 6. Students learn in different ways, and variety is always a good thing.

• A “Q&A” part of section can involve a lot of peer learning, if you get good at enabling the students to answer each other's questions. This requires more sophistication than just asking the smartest student to say the right answer; you have to ask the question in a way such that all of the students have a chance to grapple with the question initially posed. We'll discuss more on how to actually accomplish this in later classes.

Also note that section size and objectives influence the best choice of strategy:

• Large sections – More students to ask more and diverse questions, can have different groups do different tasks (or slightly different versions of the same basic worksheet – to build up an H-R Diagram for example).
• Small sections – easier to connect with the class as a whole, can have the whole class act as one medium-sized group (like the Interactive Lecture).