AY 300 - Fall 2012: Third Day Lesson Plan

Today's class will discuss teaching math and effective group strategies.

• Understand the role of group work versus lecturing.
• Review the role of TALC, The Astronomy Learning Center.

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

If anyone has had section already, have them informally 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.

Math Anxiety

• 93% of adults identify as being bad at math
• Different components: general dislike of math, fear of boardwork/working with peers, test anxiety

What to do to counter it:

• Never assume a math step is obvious
• Write all steps on the board
• Don't erase
• Explain in words
• Group work
  • Have students write on the board as much as possible, and explain in groups to the class or each other.
  • Try out conceptual math
  • Get students to think about whether or not their answer makes sense on a qualitative scale before moving to a quantitative one
  • Make the fraction of your class that is equation-based similar to that of exams
  • Emphasize office hours/TALC

Lecture tutorials:

• Developed as an activity for large lecture classes– lecture the first ~30 minutes, complete the activity in partners for the last ~20.
• However, written with lots of useful techniques for section

• What did you notice about the activity and implementation?
• Scaffolding
• Don't spend excessive amounts of time with any one group
• Get them to read the problem aloud– can solve many issues
• Emphasize the need to work together
• Push students to keep them attentive

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.

1. (5 min) Comment on the use of group work and active learning. (Cite research.)
2. (5 min) Ask the class what are pitfalls of group work (“Think back to group work that went poorly. Why did it fail?”). Make a list on the board and tie into some of the strategies below.
3. (10 min) Go over some of the tried-and-true group work strategies.
4. (25 min = 10 min + 15 min) Give each group (of 3 or 4 people) one group work strategy. Have them brainstorm (10 min) how they would incorporate the activity into a section. Have them think of the types of questions that would be asked, the activities done at each group table, etc. Then have each group share with the class (15 min). Repeat if time allows.

Why group work?

1. Group work appeals to many learning styles. Group work provides a sense of shared purpose that can increase motivation.
2. Group work introduces students to the insights and values of their peers.
3. Life after college will involve group work.
4. Listening to lecture and taking notes will carry the students only so far in their development. Learning cannot be passive.
5. We (as college instructors) should be encouraging and developing students' ability to do higher-order thinking.

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 could benefit from a considerable overhaul. We should 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 (…).
   3. Anything else?
3. Good group work activities take time, often more time than just lecturing. However, the added work results in added gains for the students.
4. 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.
5. “I paid all this $$ to be taught by professors and graduate students, not listen to classmates who don't know as much.” Let students know that benefits of group work. They will resist at first, but proper use of group work will show the students they are learning just as much (usually more) than if you were lecturing.
6. “Students don't like working in groups.” Students are used to working individually. Or students might fear that some group members will not pull their weight. Again, explaining the rational for group work is key, as well as providing checks for students who do not contribute.
7. Get feedback often.

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.

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).

Here are a slew of group work activities to try. (And guess what? Two of your assignments will be to implement one of these in your sections!)

1. The Interactive Lecture
   • The “biggest” form of group work, where the whole class works as one big group (and you're a group member).
   • Can be used with worksheets and/or demos.
   • Continuously call on a variety of students to explain answers. If you don't want to call on individual students (cold calling), you might call on particular groups (“This group, what do you think?”)
   • This style tends to keep all students engaged and on task.
2. Concept Mapping
   • A concept map illustrates the connection between terms, ideas, or concepts, which creates higher-level learning. Concepts and terms are written in bubbles and lines are drawn connecting related concepts. With each line, the relation is identified.
   • Students in groups can be given a partially completed concept map and a list of terms that they need to fill in the blanks with. Alternatively, students can work at filling in the relations between various concepts.
3. Jigsaw Projects
   • Each group contributes to a specific part of the assignment. When members have completed their task, all groups shuffle so that one person from each original group is in each new group. Each person then shares their answer and explanation with the rest of the group.
   • Requires EVERY person in section to be responsible for knowing why the answer is what it is.
   • Good way of covering an entire worksheet worth of questions in a short amount of time.
   • Make sure you assess that groups understand why their answer is what it is.
4. KWL
   • Stands for “what I Know, what I Want to know, and what I Learned. It happens in three parts.
     • (Part 1) To introduce a new topic, have the students list what they know about the topic before you start discussion. Collect these lists or have them share.
     • (Part 2) Using these lists, you can modify the remainder of the section to address misconceptions and erroneous understanding. Run section employing whatever demos, activities, etc. you want to use.
     • (Part 3) At the end of the unit, have students list what they have learned. You might ask them to identify the three most important concepts, answer some questions, or just free-write. Collect these lists or have them share.
5. Choreographed Group Tasks
   • Example: Suppose you hand out a worksheet that has six questions. Go through the first two questions of a worksheet on the board (with varying amounts of feedback from students). Then have students work on the next two questions (which are similar but different to the earlier questions) in groups. Then have the class explain to you how to solve question 5 (and do so on the board). Ask for a volunteer to do question 6.
   • Students learn in different ways, so variety is a good thing.
6. Activity Stations
   • Break the class into a few stations (3 is ideal), where one station deals with one aspect of what you want to cover in section that day.
   • Have the class break into groups of three, one for each station.
   • Each group spends 15 minutes at each station, then rotates.
   • Each station could be either a demo, hands-on activity, some worksheet questions.
   • Instructor must be very careful with timing so they can make it around to each group every 15 minutes to assess.
7. Open-ended Questions / Case Studies (e.g., Think Like an Astronomer)
   • One thing that makes discussion difficult in science courses is that most of our questions have a single “correct” answer. Asking open-ended questions can encourage students to think about how concepts fit together.
   • Requires that the question is at the appropriate level of the class. Takes more time to prepare.
   • Anything that allows for interpretation is ripe for discussion.
   • e.g., You have a sealed box (of doughnuts) in the front of the class. Have students in groups device experiments to determine what is in the box (without opening it). Then tie this into how astronomers might detect dark matter, etc.
   • e.g., Give each group a budget and a catalog that includes costs of telescopes, mirrors, equipment, launching into space, etc. Have them come up with a plan to build a telescope at some particular wavelength (having to weigh whether it is in space, what resolution it will have, etc.).
   • e.g., Have students reproduce the thought process of famous astronomers and scientists (e.g., Hubble's discover of other galaxies and the realization of the size of the universe).
8. Send-A-Problem
   • Have each group try to solve a different problem related to material covered in section/lecture.
   • Each group them gives their problem and suggested solution to a different group, which then evaluates the solution and offers corrections.
   • That group then gives their altered solution to another group, who provides the final evaluation.
   • Good for lengthy 7a/7b type problems or problems involving multiple steps. Has groups practice group thinking and comparing/discriminating among multiple solutions.

1. Draft a lesson plan. Bring a copy to the next class. We'll discuss techniques for improving your lessons plans then.
2. We spent time talking about active learning and group work in Ay300. Pick one of the various techniques or group-learning activities and implement it in your next section. Be sure to answer the questions for this week's teaching log before the next class. Also, bring your teaching log with you to class. They will be checked (and the questions discussed).
3. Send Therese and Jonnie some homework questions from your class. We will have you practice answering questions about these assignments at the board.