Make Clickers Work for You: Facilitation and Questions

Primary Presenter: Stephanie Chasteen

Organization: University of Colorado Boulder

Role: Outreach Director

Track: Hands-On Workshop

Level: For Mere Mortals

Abstract: Clickers can make teaching more effective and fun, but how does a teacher best use clickers in the class? In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore research-based ideas for questioning to achieve student engagement and deep learning. We will focus on the use of “peer instruction” in which students discuss challenging questions. We’ll compare example questions, practice writing questions, discuss common challenges, and share tips on getting students to productively reason through them. No software needed.

Bio: Dr. Chasteen has been working to conduct and communicate the results of education research for the past five years. A PhD physicist, she currently works in educational research and assessment and directs the outreach efforts of the Science Education Initiative, spreading the word about effective pedagogy on campus and beyond. She has presented over 40 workshops on effective teaching using clickers, and over 60 professional development workshops for faculty and K12 teachers. She has produced a suite of popular videos showing clicker use in action which appear, along with pedagogical resources for clicker use, at http://STEMvideos.colorado.edu

Description: I request a 2-hour session for this workshop. In numerous presentations, I have found that it's not possible to get to all the content and include interactive components in less than two hours. Objectives and outcome: Participants will be able to: Explain several benefits of questioning and of using clickers to question; Explain and defend the use of several best-practices in clicker use to overcome common challenges; Formulate and revise clicker questions to target student learning goals. Here is the current outline of this workshop. You can see examples of previous presentations at http://STEMclickers.colorado.edu. Intro / Why use clickers? (25 min) Brainstorm discussion of "why question in class?" Discuss use of technology for questioning, and benefits of clickers. About peer instruction (20 min) Show a video of peer instruction in action. Discuss the difference between the technological tool (the clicker) and pedagogy (peer instruction). Try a practice question. Discuss participant questions. Participants do an exercise to create a list of core philosophies behind this pedagogy. Writing questions (30 min) Present key tips for writing good questions. Participants do a "gallery walk" to see a wide variety of example questions, and we share-out as a group about key features of these questions. Participants brainstorm a question of their own, and swap with a neighbor to rate on Bloom's Taxonomy. Share out. Challenges (15 min) Participants brainstorm challenges they might face, and solutions. Best practices (25 min) Using the brainstormed "challenges" list, we go through the different steps of peer instruction and common hurdles, brainstorming solutions and best practices. Action Plan (5 min) Participants write down an action plan on how they will apply ideas they heard in the workshop.