102. Team-Based Learning

A large body of research finds that active learning approaches result in larger learning gains than traditional lecture approaches. In this episode, Dr. Kristin Croyle joins us to discuss how she transitioned from  explore using interactive lecture to collaborative learning, and then to team-based learning. Kristin is a Psychologist and our new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Johnson, R. T., & Johnson, D. W. (2008). Active learning: Cooperation in the classroom. The annual report of educational psychology in Japan, 47, 29-30.
  • A discussion by Dan Ariely explaining why asking for shorter lists of positive features in a relationship can engender positive feelings appears in this March 24, 2014 video clip.
  • Michaelsen, L. K., Knight, A. B., & Fink, L. D. (2004). Team-based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching.
  • Team-Based Learning Cooperative
  • Epstein Educational Enterprises, What is the IF-AT?
  • Sweet, M., & Michaelsen, L. K. (2012). Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Croyle, K. L., & Alfaro, E. (2012). Applying team-based learning with Mexican American students in the social science classroom. Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement, 203-220.
  • Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257.
  • 74. Uncoverage – David Voelker – Tea for Teaching podcast episode discussing the uncoverage movement in history, March 27, 2019

Transcript

John: A large body of research finds that active learning approaches result in larger learning gains than traditional lecture approaches. In this episode, we explore one faculty member’s transition from using interactive lecture to collaborative learning, and then to team-based learning.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Kristin Croyle. Kristin is a Psychologist and our new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are:

Kristin: Earl Grey

Rebecca: I am having Mama’s work tea, because Ada made it this morning and she calls it work tea, which means she pulls the tea bag tag out and puts it in the big cup. Also, it’s just my normal English Afternoon. But, that was a better story.

John: And I’m drinking Spring Cherry green tea.

Rebecca: We invited you here today to talk about collaborative and team-based learning in your classes. But before you do that, you’ve noted that you had a strong preparation in teaching before you got started. Can you talk a little bit about that. We’ve talked a little bit about that on the show before and how a lot of faculty aren’t prepared…

Kristin: Um hmm.

Rebecca: So, could you talk about how your preparation may be informed what you’ve done.

Kristin: My graduate program, I went to the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Montana in beautiful Missoula. And that program takes the preparation of their grad students very seriously, but across several areas not just in clinical work and research, but also knowing that some of them are going to end up in positions in which there will be teaching. So, while I was there, that very first semester I was brought in, they had a structure for teaching their introductory psychology classes where graduate students were assigned our own classes where we were the instructor in the classroom, but we had a supportive network around us. So, the syllabus was already there, the textbook was already there. We collaborated in writing tests. We had a structure of TAs that supported us and they would have recitation sections in which the TAs also received development. And we joined in that so we could see how more hands-on kind of things could be done with students in smaller groups. We even assigned our final grades together. And some of those pieces are pieces that are areas of skill that people don’t often think about developing. So, that first semester, all I had to do was think about working within the structure: How am I going to handle the day-to-day teaching and learning in the classroom? I didn’t have to worry about course design because the course was already designed in front of me. And I also didn’t have to, at the end, think: “When you assign grades, is that rigid? Do you really have to follow the exact, you know, 90/80 that it is in the syllabus? Or what if there are natural breaks around 88 or 89? Is it okay to flex that? What kind of power does an instructor have that is fair to students and evaluation?” I got to do all of that in a collaborative setting with a very experienced faculty member as a guide. There was also a credit-bearing course for teaching psychology that we were encouraged to take… which I really enjoyed. And then I was given opportunities to function more independently. When they needed a stats teacher over the summer, and they knew I was living there over the summer, I got to teach on an adjunct basis, but still with the support of faculty around me. So kind of putting students in the deep end, but with a high level of support around them, I felt very prepared when I was done with the graduate program to enter into an assistant professor position. And I still appreciate the preparation that they gave me.

Rebecca: I think with the preparation like that you’re probably far more willing to experiment and do new things as a faculty member too and to maybe even break away from what faculty around you are doing. Do you find that to be the case? Or were there other faculty doing some of this collaborative work in the department that you were in?

Kristin: Yes, and no. One of the experiences I had at my previous institution, which was the University of Texas – Pan American that then transitioned through a merger to be the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I was talking with a colleague in another department about the kinds of things we were doing in the classroom. And I still remember him saying “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that in the classroom and that was like teaching.” He had a very restricted idea of what teaching was, and what would be acceptable to colleagues, which he had never had the opportunity to test with other people around him. And that was something that I arrived from day one… that you talked about your teaching… that you can do many different things in the classroom. And it’s all teaching, as long as you are trying to work with students to create a learning environment and they are learning, then it counts as teaching. So I did come in with a much more flexible idea, then certainly some of my colleagues who hadn’t had an opportunity to ever have those discussions. And of course, some people are hired into departments in which those discussions don’t ever happen, so they may persist with those misconceptions for many years.

John: Or throughout their entire careers at times. [LAUGHTER] The scaffolding that was provided is really nice, because we’ve talked to a few people who’ve been in teaching training program or had some training in graduate programs. But usually, it’s not quite as structured as that and that’s a nice feature.

Rebecca: Yeah, I came from a program like that, but it was like very front loaded. It wasn’t that ongoing…. So I felt a lot more prepared, because I did have a lot of those experiences, but I didn’t have that same kind of supportive network throughout. Which is incredibly valuable.

Rebecca: So, you want to take us through what some of your collaborative experiences have been in the classroom and the ways that you set up some of the team-based learning exercises, maybe starting with what are those?

Kristin: Sure. So kind of the way that I journey through my teaching, particularly when I was an assistant professor, I felt comfortable in the classroom, but I didn’t feel expert. I felt like I was still trying to figure out what was going on, which is a perfectly fine way to be and a good state for learning to occur. So I felt like I was a talented lecturer, like I can engage students. I teach in psychology, I also think psychology is naturally very engaging, but part of that is because I really love the field. So, I felt like I could engage students and that they would listen and that they would be interested. But I started to become dissatisfied that there was always a core of engaged students and I had no idea what was happening with the other students in the class. And then sometimes I would be disappointed when we have tests or homework. Everyone said they had no questions. Clearly that was wrong. I was wondering how do you engage the majority or all of the students in their learning so that they aren’t coasting through class believing that they understand until they really don’t. And then I also felt like I was kind of fooling myself into thinking that students were with me when they were not with me. So I had an opportunity at that time to do some intensive cooperative learning training along the model of Johnson and Johnson collaborative learning. And that model from the University of Minnesota, it focuses on the importance of cooperation in the classroom, and that in cooperative settings, students learn more, develop a stronger sense of self efficacy around their learning; that they together are able to achieve more than they would individually. And it also has impacts on retention… that if students are feeling like they are individually known and valued in the classroom by their peers, they’re more likely to continue showing up to class and to develop relationships outside of the classroom that supports them along the way. So through that training, it was intensive, it was like eight hours a week, one day set for several weeks. The very first day, I could see what a difference I was going to make in my classroom. So, for example, I was using group assignments in class and they had all the same disadvantages that group assignments and most classes have, because I had no idea how to structure the group work so that it would be successful. I was doing group work to save me grading time, honestly.

Rebecca: That’s why a lot of people go to group work.

Kristin: Yes! Without understanding that all I had to do was some structural changes, and then it would actually be effective for learning as well, instead of just saving me grading time. In that cooperative learning training, I learned how to structure intensive group work that could be the length of an entire semester, or it could be the length of a single class day. I learned how to structure less intensive moments of team time. So how do you do a think-pair-share that works versus how do you do a think-pair-share that doesn’t work very well. So, that within the course of that training… actually just within a few days… I suddenly had, instead of 10% of the students in the class engaged on a daily basis, I had 100% of the students engaged on a daily basis. So, that was a huge breakthrough and I continued that way for several years.

John: What were some of the structural changes that you made that did lead to increased engagement?

Kristin: So, the cooperative learning approach of Johnson and Johnson, is kind of theoretically heavy, in the sense that they outline the pieces that are necessary for strong collaboration to occur. And then they turn it over to you as the instructor to say, “How do I build those pieces in?” So, for example, they emphasize positive interdependence as one of the essential components of cooperative learning… that when you create a group and a group activity for them to do, the activity has to be structured in such a way that each person is necessary to contribute. You can’t structure it in such a way that you can have three people talking when one person is only needed, and there are specific recommendations on how do you structure it so that everyone is needed. At the same time you have to build an individual accountability as another required component, so that, even if each person is needed, people can still slack off, say, “Yes, you all can’t do as well without me because you need me, but I don’t really care about what is happening here.” There has to be a level of individual accountability that’s also built in. Along with that, some of the skills that I thought were most important, they build an emphasis on group processing and social skills, so that if you have people consistently working together in class, they may not have developed the social skills to do that effectively, especially over time. You can work with someone for two minutes on a think-pair-share and really be bad at social skills. But, if you have to work with them over an extended period of time on a project and things are going south in terms of group conflict, it’s the instructor’s responsibility to help them to develop the social skills to work together. For example, on the first day of class, when I first start having students talk to each other so that they know that’s going to be a pattern in the class, I give them something quick to talk about. And I say introduce yourself to the person next to you… spend two minutes talking about this. And then I’m going to ask you about what you talked about. And then I run around the class real quick… pair up people who aren’t participating, introduce them to each other so that they understand this is a part of the class. So, then I follow back. So, what pieces are important there? …that I explicitly instruct them, you turn with your body… you actually make eye contact. And I will point out as people first start doing this, look at these two people, they are looking at each other, because many times students won’t do that, and it’s very hard to have a cooperative interaction if you don’t make eye contact… and I will say, “Who was the person you talked to? Tell me their name.” So they understand that I was serious when I said, introduce yourself, tell me something about them and that there’s individual accountability through just random calling on… that they need to participate in the cooperative portion. And then there’s also the self-reinforcing aspect of it that five minutes later, when I say to talk about something else, they realize they already know somebody in class, they have a connection. The next day, when I come in, they’re not quiet, they’re already talking to each other, they’ve created those connections.

John: A nice thing about that, too, is for people who are uncomfortable talking about themselves in class, having one person tell you something about the other person, it’s a little bit less pressure, it’s a little less revelation to the whole group. There’s some evidence that that type of thing is more effective in providing a more comfortable environment.

Rebecca: Kristin, can you also talk a little bit about a specific example of a cooperative activity where all of the members are held accountable, and all have a role? …just to provide an example for people who have less experience.

Kristin: So cooperative learning can be divided into informal and formal cooperative learning. Informal cooperative learning tends to be much shorter activities that can be done kind of on the fly if you already have an idea in your mind of how you might want to do that. Formal cooperative learning tends to be more intensively structured… longer-term activities. So that could be a single class session. If you’re going to do an activity that takes an hour, that would be more formal… or if you’re going to do something that takes an entire semester. The pair-and-share that I just talked about is an example of informal cooperative learning. Something like a jigsaw classroom activity can be structured as a formal cooperative learning activity. And it already shares almost all of the components: there’s individual accountability, because each student is given a specific role. There’s also positive interdependence, because the success of everyone depends on each person doing their role. So there are ones that are already structured with a built in component. The pieces that aren’t built into something like a jigsaw classroom activity, would be the group skills and group processing, and the ways that you can build that in. You can, for example, ask groups to reflect on what went well. I typically emphasize that more than asking them to reflect on things that went poorly, because asking to reflect on what went well tends to maintain a positive atmosphere, but also helps them to cover both bases at the same time anyway.

Rebecca: …or realize that my list for what went well is not very long… [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Right. So, a common group processing thing I would have students do after their first more lengthy or more formal cooperative learning activity would be: list three things that your team did well together and one thing that you could improve on. And another thing I might ask them to do is to provide positive feedback to each member of the group at the end of the activity. And the kind of feedback that they provide is usually pretty specific, and helps to shape their behavior throughout the rest of the semester. So when they say things like, “I like it when you disagreed, and you said that this other thing would be a better way to go” that provides important feedback, and it helps to encourage better processing going forward. But I will go around and give individual social skill feedback too. But it’s usually things like, “Oh, I see you’re sitting so far away from your group, I’m not sure they can hear you, let’s scoot your chair in so that they can hear you.” Or I might ask, “Oh, do you know this person’s name next to you? What’s her name?” …and we’ll make sure that people maintain the social and cooperative connections that enable to do that kind of good group.

John: Just as an aside, it’s useful if you’re asking about things that went well, to keep the list fairly short. I’m reminded of a study that Dan Ariely talked about where they did a controlled experiment where in one case, they asked people to reflect on three things they liked about their partner and another case to list 10 things I liked about the partner, and then they surveyed them on the quality of the relationship. And those who were asked about three things generally rated their relationship with a partner fairly high. But when they were asked to come up with 10 things, they struggled with that and they rated that relationship lower. So keeping the list short…

Kristin: Right.

John: …is really good so you don’t…

Kristin: There’s kind of analogous thought about keeping things like gratitude lists. If you list too much stuff, it can have a negative effect, because you start to identify things that you really don’t think are that important, and it makes you think the whole thing is less important.

John: And if you want to get the opposite effect, ask people to list 10 things that were bad, and then they’ll struggle beyond the first few. You talked about having continuous relationships or persistent relationships with collaborative learning. Did you try to keep the group relationships consistent for the same groups throughout the term? Or did you vary that?

Kristin: I varied it. There are some good data to suggest that in collaborative learning… they refer to them as base teams… that base teams have a persistent positive effect, particularly on things like student engagement and retention throughout the semester and throughout the year…. that you have a team that is expecting you every day. But when I was doing cooperative learning, I didn’t restructure my courses. I restructured the day. Does that make sense?

Rebecca: Um hmm.

Kristin: So I didn’t have a reason for base groups. And I felt strange imposing them on the students without a reason. Besides, they would maybe be socially a good idea. I had to completely rebuild my courses from the ground up before I started using base teams. And that’s when I transitioned to team-based learning.

John: …and in team-based learning, persistent teams are recommended as part of the process.

Kristin: Absolutely.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about this transition to team-based learning. What prompted you to introduce that? …and how it worked?

Kristin: So I was happy with how courses were going. People were interested and engaged. I had students telling me, “I know every single person in this classroom.” and when you’re teaching a class of 30, or 40, or 50, that’s unusual. “I know everyone in here, I feel really supported.” I feel like things were going well. But I was unsatisfied with what I was teaching. I wasn’t clear, in my own mind, about what persistent learning outcomes I wanted for my students. I had not sat down and really thought through if I were to follow up with a student in a year or five years, what would I want them to recall from this class? What would I want them to be putting into use in their lives or in their careers? I had never thought that through. And I was fortunate enough to run into team-based learning at that time, right as I was primed to start thinking about this questions. Team-based learning originated by Larry Michaelsen. He was coming from the perspective of enrollment increases. He had been assigning some pretty challenging work. He was a faculty member in business. And as his course enrollments increased, he started to wonder how can you maintain the same kind of interesting, really challenging in class… by case work, for example… with a large enrollment. So he developed team-based learning to address that piece, but it also requires you to completely rethink the design of the course. And to start from the course outcomes: “What do you want the persistent outcomes to be?” …and then structure the course forward in that way. So in team-based learning, after you make a decision about your course outcomes, and what you really want students to be able to do, then you structure the course in a modular fashion. And each module has certain steps. So the beginning is student preparation, then when they come into class, you test. You say, “okay” …and it’s called the readiness assurance process. So you want to know what students are ready to do after they’ve individually prepared, and what they’re not ready to do. So they prepare, they test. And then, since it’s a team focus, they also test as a team. After that you have a good idea as an instructor, what are they ready to do? What are still the fuzzy areas? What do they really not get at all? What are their competencies as a team already, even if every individual student doesn’t have it, and then you can do some corrective lecturing, basically, so many lectures that fill in some of the gaps. And that’s all part of the readiness process, because you’re getting them ready to do some interesting application work in class. And the rationale for that is… and actually what I had been doing prior to that, was giving interesting application material to work on at home individually, while doing lecture and cooperative learning in class. But the interesting application material was actually the heart of the course, and the much more challenging piece. So it was better to bring the hard piece where they needed support into the classroom. And the piece they were ready to do, which was to do their own self study back into their own lives. So you do this readiness assurance process to make sure they are ready for interesting application, and then the majority at the time for the module you spent on application. Doing that after I had already worked with cooperative learning was really helpful, because all of that application work is done in a team setting. So when you already have some experience with how to build teams, how to maintain and develop their social skills, that’s really, really, really helpful. That’s a short version.

John: One of my colleagues, Bill Goffe, who was on one of our very early podcasts, noted that when he gave the group test, the performance always went up significantly, so that they could see the benefits of the peer discussion that was part of that. And he was really impressed with it. And he noted that, oftentimes, if a student didn’t show up for class one day, they get a hard time from their classmates from the group because they let the group down. And he said his attendance had never been better than when he was using a team-based learning approach.

Kristin: Absolutely. And a lot of people who do team-based learning, use the same methodology for doing the team testing, which is honestly really cute. It’s a scratch-off form. And the scratch-off form is used so that the team gets immediate feedback on each option. So on any particular item in a multiple choice test, if they want to select “B” they scratch off “B.” If it’s not there, then they continue to scratch until they get the right answer. For one thing, they love it. But also they are getting immediate team feedback. If this person is not speaking up, if they say I think it’s “B” and then they stop advocating and then it turns out to be “B” later than the team immediately knows, by the time they get to the next question. “Okay, we need to incorporate more feedback from all of our team members, wait a minute, this person who’s not speaking up actually has a lot to say.” In the course of just a few multiple choice questions, it brings their team development forward leaps and bounds. And they kind of have fun with a scratch off, which is also a bonus.

John: And it also gives them incentives to come prepared and to listen to other people in ways that they might not otherwise.

Kristin: Yeah, and their team will give them grief, if they say “Oh, I don’t know, because I didn’t read,” their team members will be like, “But we are depending on you, you need to read, we all read.”

John: And it also gives them a little bit, perhaps, of improvement in metacognition because they’re getting that immediate feedback, and it’s being coupled with the reactions of the peers. So if someone was insistent on a wrong answer, and they dominated that discussion, they might be a little more careful in the future and more willing to listen to the other people and reflect.

Kristin: Exactly, and it doesn’t have to wait till next week, it can happen right away. Right on the next question. The team application activities are also structured in a particular way. In team-based learning, they talk about the four S’s for the application activity, the first one is that you have to select a significant problem. So what they’re working on is something that will be important to them, something that they will identify with, or that they recognize is worth their time in thinking about and trying to think through. The second one is that they need to be working on this same problem. You can’t say teams one and two are working on this, three and four are working on this, five and six are working on this. Third one is that they structure in so that they make a specific choice as the outcome. Because it’s easier to solicit team feedback if everyone is making a specific choice rather than having kind of an open-ended narrative response. And it helps to stimulate whole group discussion as you’re moving. Now it can sound like it’s limiting to say that you have to make a specific choice, but you can do in a very broad way. And the fourth one is simultaneous reporting. So all the teams are asked to report at the same time on what the choice was that they made, so that they can’t piggyback off another team who’s putting in effort. So, as an example, one of the courses that I taught in the psychology major in Texas was the tests and measurements course in psychology, and test and measurements starts with a stats review. They’ve all had statistics, it usually comes prior to tests and measurement. But it’s the first time that they have an opportunity to work with statistics in kind of a decision-making way. So you start with a stats review. So one of the activities that I would do, I gave them two hypothetical first-grade teachers with how many questions 10 of there students got right on a spelling test. And the two distributions had the same mean, but one was fairly normal, and one was highly skewed. So they had to do their quick statistics review… Do the mean, median, mode and standard deviation describe the shape of the distribution. But the question I was asking them was, “If you were the principal, which teacher would you offer an after-school tutoring program to for extra pay? And which teacher would you potentially nominate for a teaching award?” They found that question to be a really interesting question. For one thing, students think a lot about what good teaching is, and what constitutes a good teacher. So they already come in with very strong opinions. And they also understand the complexity of, you know, if everybody’s passing but people aren’t excelling, is that good teaching? Whereas if most people are failing, but a few people are getting an “A” is that good teaching? …and how the data contributes to good decision making, but can also be kind of manipulated to contribute to decision making in not such a good way. So instead of just saying, “Let’s review the stats, here they are,” it was a question with a specific choice that they simultaneously reported on. And then we could discuss together. And of course, their answers are different. There’s different rationales in both ways. So then we could discuss together what their rationale was, if they want to debate they can debate a little. It generates a lot of student enthusiasm, and everybody’s doing it instead of just 10% of the class.

John: And once they’ve committed to an answer, they have a stake in and they really want to know, that’s something we’ve seen a lot of things we’ve talked about in the past, too.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Rebecca: When you were doing the team-based learning, were you sticking specifically to problems that were on a class-by-class basis still, like you were discussing in the co-operative setting, or were you doing some longer term activities that went across multiple class periods?

Kristin: I had the… what I consider gift… to often be teaching in a three-hour time slot, which is my very favorite time slot. So I would have activities that would extend two or three hours, but typically not between classes, I found that to be more of a sweet spot, at least for me. At my previous institution we had a very high commuter population. And I promised, in both models, that I would never ask them to do something out of class with their teams, that was one of my rules… that it was just simply too burdensome for students who have multiple outside of school commitments… family and work, or living potentially 150 miles apart, which was not unheard of. I promised them no out of class stuff. I structured that intentionally so that the individual preparation that they were doing, they could do anywhere on their own time schedule, but they were expected to be there. And their team expected them to be there to be able to engage in class. And it was also one of the ways that you talk people into it, when they say “I worked with other groups who were all slackers and we would always set times and they wouldn’t show up.” And I said “That’s not going to happen in here. We already have a time we’re all going to show up together.”

John: And the philosophy that’s very similar to the flipped classroom approach where you let students do the easy stuff outside and then give them assistance with or have them work in a framework where they’re getting more assistance with the more challenging issues.

Kristin: Absolutely. I think TBL [team-based learning] is definitely a flipped classroom approach.

Rebecca: I think the other thing that helps too with that model… of making sure you’re not working outside of class… really helps students with really different backgrounds start working together, because you might have students who are more traditional who are on campus. And so for them to meet outside of class is often not such a big deal. But then if you have students who are working or have families, and there’s a disconnect in the class, even, between those two populations, that helps make that more obvious and work a little bit better,

Kristin: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And I didn’t want to set up anything where people were made to feel like unvalued team members, because they couldn’t do what was asked of them because of other commitments. Since that was in my control, I wanted to make sure that people felt welcome.

Rebecca: I’ve tried to even do that with long-term projects. In the field that I’m in, we tend to do things that go across class periods, but there’s always the “Are we going to do this outside of class or are we going to do this inside of class, and I try to have them do anything that needs to be collaborative, and decision making, in class, and then things that can be done on their own, even if that means doing some creative work, or whatever, outside of class. But those are independent things that can be done for the same reasons. And I find that students will try to manipulate that system, so that they’re gonna: “Oh, we’ll just do it outside of class, because we don’t want her to know whether or not we’re on top of something,” or whatever. But I call them out on it, because it’s really devaluing some of that exact thing. People have other commitments and things.

John: You mentioned, you started to use a backwards design approach where you started with the things you want them to remember five years later. Did you have to cut back on the breadth of the coverage in the class, to some extent, by doing that?

Kristin: Yes, I did. When I was going with the straight up cooperative learning approach, I did not have to cut back on the content at all. Without the full redesign, I found I could cover the same amount of material in straight lecture versus in a cooperative setting. But it was all coverage. It was just a different kind of coverage. When I approached it from a backward design perspective, and I really was able to focus on the objectives that I thought were important, I did have to reduce the amount of things that we were covering. I have no regrets about that, of course, because I completely recognize that covering material isn’t just covering it. What are students going to do with something I covered in class? They didn’t cover it, I was the one who was learning it and talking about it. So I’m much happier with an approach in which I am consistently hitting on the objectives that I really want them to recall, and that they are working hard to apply those throughout the semester.

John: If they’re not going to remember it passed the final exam, covering more material isn’t terribly useful.

Kristin: No.

John: We talked about that in a previous podcast with David Voelker, who talking about the coverage approach in History…

Kristin: Right.

John: …which is the same logic.

Kristin: Exactly. And I actually now consider that to be a complete waste of time. So why am I spending class time on something that I actually don’t really care if they remember, it’s not the most important thing to me, and they really don’t care if they remember.

Rebecca: You have some compelling arguments for why team-based learning and collaborative learning are good options. If one wanted to start moving in that direction, what would you suggest their first steps be?

Kristin: For team-based learning, there are a couple of great books that are very easy to approach. There are several great resources for team-based learning. Larry Michaelsen published a book in 2008, for example, that covers that from front to back. It gives examples of applications in different disciplines. There’s also a book published a few years later on team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities. That also covers the basics, but has applications that are more specific to social sciences and humanities. Team-based learning has really caught on in medical education and in business education. So in the original book, there are more application examples that are in MD preparation or in business schools. So if you’re looking for other examples, the second book might be a good choice as well. And that one is edited by Michael Sweet and Larry Michaelsen.

John: And in fact, I read your article, or

Kristin: Oh, did you?

John: …your chapter in there as background.

Kristin: I’m glad someone read it.

John: Now I have to read all the others. But, I, at least, did read that. It was very good. So for faculty who are moving to this, what are some pitfalls that they might run into? Or what sort of problems might they encounter?

Kristin: Team-based learning as being a much more structured approach… Michaelsen does a really nice job of laying out the pieces that he thinks are critical. And I agree they are critical. So, for example, he talks about explaining, and testing the model with students on the first class day, and you cannot skip it. So the very first class day, I give students an example individual application test, like they would get for their readiness assurance. It includes basic psychology knowledge that may or may not be present in the culture. So they have some chance of getting some of them right and some not. And then I have them do it as a team. And the team scores, of course, are always dramatically higher than the individual scores. And the team testing process is so much better. [LAIGHTER] It’s more pleasant and interesting and collaborative than they expect it to be. That simply going through that, it allays many of their fears about what a team is going to be like to work with. Plus, when they see that the team has tripled their individual score, they’re like, “Hey, maybe I could depend on other people to help me learn, and maybe this will pay off for me.” So going through an explanation of what the rationale is, having them experience it a little is really, really critical in helping them stay open minded while they experience it. And then regularly throughout the semester, I will keep reinforcing them with those messages. I’ll say, look at this amazing thing you guys did. You used all the intellectual resources around you, and you analyzed this difficult problem and came up with some great solutions. I’ll remind them how much they’re learning and what kinds of challenging tasks they’re able to do as a team when they have the preparation to do it, which helps as they’re starting to think “Well, wouldn’t it just be easier if I could do this by myself?” It helps them to kind of remember, ”Well, yes, but you wouldn’t be doing this, you would be doing something not as challenging, not as integrative.”

John: and probably not learning quite as much either&hellp;

Kristin: Yes. He also emphasizes an aspect that is also emphasized in cooperative learning… of helping the teams develop and giving them feedback, helping them give each other feedback. That’s also really critical, especially very early in the semester, as they’re starting to develop group norms and bond together to make sure that you don’t short the time in class for them to have some group processing time and to build their team skills. So, for example, when I taught last spring, I had a student who came to me after I think it was the second week. So it’s very early in the semester, and she said, “I really need to reassigned teams. My team hates me, they won’t make eye contact with me.” She was really upset. And I’m reluctant to reassign people teams, because often what they’re experiencing, they take with them. It’s not always a function of that team process. So we talked some, and I tried to get a handle on what she was experiencing. I knew where she sat, I had an idea of the team composition. And I asked her to try one more day, just one more day. And then we would talk about reassigning her teams. And that day, I was sure to build in plenty of time for group processing, where they talked about what they were doing well as a team and something to improve. Their team turned around immediately. She was a relatively assertive person, which I already knew. I knew that she could handle this. So she went back to the team. She was able to talk with her team about not feeling heard. They immediately turned around in the way that they were with her. And by the very next class day, they were a relatively high functioning team. They did well all semester. They brought doughnuts for each other. I mean, it was a really nice supportive group. What they needed was the time in class to do some processing. And if I, as the instructor, had been moving too fast, and not giving them time to do that, and not giving them a prompt to do that, it would have been a really negative experience for her. So, also building in time for the team to develop and prompts for them to do that.

Rebecca: So you mentioned liking to have a three-hour teaching slot.

Kristin: That’s my favorite. It’s not required.

Rebecca: So, in that amount of time, how much time would you designate towards this group processing, for example, to give people an idea of what that proportion or the amount of time to dedicate so that you don’t shortcut it and you don’t rush through it?

Kristin: If I were to do an activity that might take an hour, I might spend 10 minutes for group process, it doesn’t have to be very long, or even five. And you don’t have to do it every time, you could do 10 minutes after the first one or two more intensive activities, and then not do it for another few times… and another five minutes just every so often to help them resolve their underlying dissatisfactions and to recognize that what they’re doing is not just application activity, it’s also group interaction. So please take time to do both. Another really important required component that I didn’t mention is peer evaluation, I always incorporate peer evaluation as part of the grade.

John: How did you form the teams in these classes?

Kristin: They’re heterogeneous, first, with a very open process so students can see it happening and know there are no shenanigans… that this is all very open… talking about the rationale that people of different backgrounds bring different strengths. So you want a group that has people of different backgrounds, so you can have a larger kind of learning base between you. So usually, I’ll pick a few characteristics that might be important in that kind of background. And I will line them up around the room based on those characteristics. And if it’s 200 people, it’s a really long line. And then we count off. So when I teach introductory psychology, students who have had a high school psychology class usually are starting a big leg up on the other students. So I’ll include that as a characteristic. Sometimes I’ll include the distance that people are coming from, because then they have different experiences, depending on what class I might also include if their student athletes, just because if you put too many together in a team, then they’re all gone on the same day. They have interesting backgrounds, but they also have patterns of attendance and of absence that need to be adjusted around. And we’ll count off all the way around so people can see how the teams are made. But heterogeneous teams are really, really critical. Having students with pre-existing relationships will throw off the team process in a way that automatically excludes people that don’t have pre-existing relationships… plus they tend to be lower performing teams. And I don’t want to set that up on purpose.

John: One of my colleagues once did this in a class of, I think it was about 350 students, but he just sorted them alphabetically. So he had them organize himself that way, and it was a fairly long process. But, it was kind of amusing for those of us wandering by and just seeing…

Kristin: …this huge line… Yeah.

John: He didn’t do it that way In the future, he used other criteria.

Kristin: I’ve had colleagues that I’ve talked with that think that this is a long process. It’s not. You can sort 200 people in 10 minutes, and then you’re done for the whole semester,

John: Doing it alphabetically…

Kristin: takes a lot longer.

John: …can be more challenging, because they were self forming that… it didn’t convert rapidly.

Kristin: The other thing I never do is I don’t put the students who didn’t come the first day into a team, because there are characteristics about why they didn’t come the first day. If you put them all together in one team, they share some of those characteristics… It tends not to be a very high performing team. So I make sure they’re sorted out among the other teams. But that was one of the things that I learned in cooperative learning. That, before I did cooperative learning training, and I was assigning group work, I would assign people based on if you didn’t come the day we did the assignments, you were in another group. And that group typically did not do very well. And as an instructor, it’s my responsibility to create a learning environment in which students can excel, it’s on them whether they do their part. But if I’m setting up a team in ignorance, with predictable characteristics, so that they’re going to have a failure experience, that’s on me to correct. And it’s not on them. So afterwards, I felt guilty when I had come to a new realization. But, yeah, it’s my responsibility to set up an environment in which those students can be successful in their teams.

John: In your chapter in that book, you mentioned that when you switched over, it did affect your course evaluations a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kristin: Just a little bit. But yes, it did. So when I was doing straight lecture, I was shooting for engaged lecture. And in psychology, you can build in little experiences, especially in introductory psychology, where the topics are changing frequently, you can always build things in that are kind of interesting. You can do a little optical illusion here and a little bit of memory trick there. And there’s these ways to build it in, but it is still basically straight lecture. And I got high evaluations for that. I was careful about trying to build those in every day, you know, every few minutes. And when I went to cooperative learning, where it was essentially the same approach, but in in a much more engaged and cooperative fashion, those evaluations stayed very high. Students knew each other, they were happy in class. When I went to team-based learning and I was actually asking every student to participate all the time, and be prepared in class in a way that their contributions were much more obvious than mine. My evaluations did drop just a little bit, not a lot, but a little. And I am grateful that I was teaching in a context where I knew that my department wouldn’t care. They were more interested that I was doing good teaching. And they understood the many factors that influence student evaluations. But I also recognize that it’s incumbent on me to help students understand how they are learning, what kinds of things encourage learning and retention, and then you kind of let the student evaluations fall where they may.

John: When I read that, it reminded me of that study that came out a few weeks ago from Harvard in their physics program, where they found that students in active learning classes did demonstrably better on tests, but they perceived their learning as being lower. So there was a pretty strong inverse relationship between their perception of learning and actual learning. That seems to be fairly common, there have been a number of other studies where what students think to be most effective, is often not what most enhances their learning.

Kristin: Right.

John: Do you have any other advice for our listeners, who might think about using either collaborative or team-based learning in their classes,

Kristin: The one thing I would say is that teaching a cooperative learning or a team-based learning structure class is a lot more fun. You have to be willing to give up control, because when you’re lecturing, you have absolute control… meaning even that students can’t ask you weird things, because you haven’t opened the door for that to happen. But when you structure the learning experience, and then you give up the control to the students, it is an exciting environment to be in. I wasn’t as tired when I was coming out of class. I was energized, you could feel the difference in the room just walking into class… they were excited and talking with each other. When I would circulate around before class started, they’re talking about the class instead of talking about other stuff. It completely changes the environment in the classroom in a way that I think really matches what I expect out of a university education for students, it creates a environment of intellectual enthusiasm around the topic that you’re teaching.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Kristin: That’s a great question. So right now I’m 100% administrative. And since I’m in a new position, in a new institution, I’m gonna spend some time figuring out all the newness pieces. But I’d like to go back to the classroom, at least for a course here and there when I can. There’s nothing different about students than there is about people. So I also think often about how what we do in the classroom, what we understand works and what we understand doesn’t work, how that applies in administrative settings as well. We know for example, that people tend to try and find the shortest path. So if they’re trying to learn something, they want to put in the least effort to learn it. If you ask a faculty member to do a task for the department, they are obviously going to choose the easiest path to do that… not necessarily the best path. So how do I take the experiences of learning and teaching, that in some ways are better understood to an environment of administration that in some ways is not as well understood? What kinds of lessons can I apply there as well?

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much. It’s been a really interesting conversation. I’m sure it gives a lot of people things to think about as they move forward in this semester and future semesters.

Kristin: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

70. Dynamic lecturing

The lecture has dominated instructional practice for several centuries. In the last few decades, though, the lecture mode of instruction has often been criticized by advocates of active learning approaches. In this episode, Dr. Christine Harrington joins us to discuss evidence on the effectiveness of lectures and how we can create lectures that better support student learning. Christine is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at New Jersey City University and the author of Dynamic Lecturing and several other books related to teaching, learning, and student success. Christine has been the Executive Director of the Student Success Center at the New Jersey Council of County Colleges.

Show Notes

  • Dr. Christine Harrington Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at New Jersey City University (NJCU) Previously served as Executive Director of the Center for Student Success at the New Jersey Council of County Colleges (NJCCC)
  • Todd Zakrajsek – Co-author of Dynamic Learning
  • Dr. Neil Bradbury – Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Rosalind Franklin University of Science and Medicine
  • Bradbury, N. A. (2016). Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Advances in Physiology Education,40(4), 509-513.
  • Richard Mayer- Professor of Psychology and Multimedia Learning at University of California at Santa Barbara
  • Mayer, R. (2019). How Multimedia Can Improve Learning and Instruction. In J. Dunlosky & K. Rawson (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 460-479). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108235631.019
  • New Jersey City University Ed.D. in Community College Leadership program
  • Dr. Harrington’s book, Dynamic Lecturing can be purchased from Stylus Publishing and listeners can use promo code: “ETS20” (excellent teaching series) to receive a 20% discount on the Dynamic Lecturing book or Dr. Harrington’s other book, Designing a Motivational Syllabus

Tea For Teaching episodes referenced

Student Feedback tools

Transcript

John: The lecture has dominated instructional practice for several centuries. In the last few decades, though, the lecture mode of instruction has often been criticized by advocates of active learning approaches. In this episode, we examine evidence on the effectiveness of lectures and how we can create lectures that better support student learning.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Christine Harrington, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at New Jersey City University and the author of Dynamic Lecturing and several other books related to teaching, learning, and student success. Christine has been the Executive Director of the Student Success Center at the New Jersey Council of County Colleges. Welcome Christine.

Christine: Thanks.

John: Welcome.

Rebecca: Actually it should be “welcome back.”

Christine: Thank you for having me again. I’m looking forward to a new conversation.

John: Our teas today are:

Christine: I am not today.

Rebecca: I am drinking Lady Grey.

John: And I’m drinking ginger peach black tea today. We’ve invited you here this time to talk about one of your other books on dynamic lecturing. It’s not uncommon for people to argue that lecturing is ineffective, but it’s still one of the most common forms of instructional delivery. Why is lecturing so often discouraged?

Christine: This is an interesting question. I’m not really sure where this stems from but I think that the push for active learning started to pit the lecture against the active learning approaches, the collaboration. And I really do believe that there is significant value in both approaches and I’m not sure why it became an “either or” kind of situation. But unfortunately, it really has, and one of the reasons that I decided to write this book was because the lecturing is the most common method, you know, it’s still the tried and true method of faculty rely on all of the time. And yet, there are very few resources or support to help faculty be effective at lecturing. If you go to a professional development conference, a teaching learning conference, you’re hard pressed to find a session—unless I’m there, I guess – on lecturing. I actually haven’t seen another one yet—so there really are not any resources for faculty on this and it’s not really fair that it got such a bad reputation, because there’s not validity in that thinking.

Rebecca: So that leads to a good question. What is the research on effective lecturing?

Christine: So in terms of what is effective, I think one of the first questions that we need to ask ourselves is, “Well what are we talking about?” because much of the research that exists out there, if you’re going to research a boring, monotonous lecturer… who’s got the old yellow papers and just is reading and not even looking at the students and engaging them, or you’re talking about a lecture that is dynamic and the presenter is passionate and excited about the topic. We’re not always measuring the same concept. And that’s true in group work as well. So really, when we talk about teaching and learning practices, and we try to look at the literature about what works and what doesn’t, it’s very complicated because of the complexities associated with the teaching and learning processes. However, there is research out there that does support the lecture. What much of the research really points to is that the lecture is most effective for novice learners. For students who have very little background knowledge in the subject matter, they need to have someone who’s an expert present that information in a way that they can take it in so that they are developing that expertise and hopefully learning that content. If you ask them to just engage in what’s been called inquiry-based learning or case-based learning, the research really shows that that approach is not as effective if you don’t have the background knowledge. So what in essence happens is that well-intentioned faculty and teachers use that approach and end up wasting a lot of precious learning time, because the students in the groups aren’t equipped yet to be able to tackle those high-level questions and to figure it out without the guidance. There’s some interesting research out there on the importance of it being done well, but also making sure that the lecture is done before the group work is done, so that the foundational knowledge kind of sets the stage for some of those more what we call traditional active collaborative learning experiences. So if you want to look at novice learners, you’re going to see a strong correlation between the lecture working and student success outcomes. And then there’s something called the expertise reversal effect. What happens there is the more that you know about the subject matter, the less helpful the lecture is and the more helpful those more active collaborative learning group exercises are. I still today learn from TED Talk or a great lecture. But I’m also going to really get a lot of value—especially in my area of expertise—out of dialoguing with other experts and engaging those conversations because I have a strong foundational background. So it’s kind of interesting when we think about “Does the lecture work or does it not work?” it depends on who you’re talking about, in what subject, for what purpose, under what conditions. So it’s not as simple as a yes or no, but I will tell you that there is a significant body of research that says the lecture is effective. It’s not that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we just need to make sure we’re using that method effectively.

Rebecca: One thing that you hinted at, Christine, is that with lecture from an expert, there seems to be an opportunity to ask questions, which is why just reading about stuff maybe isn’t always sufficient. If you have that opportunity to ask questions of the lecturer or am I reading into something that I shouldn’t be reading into?

Christine: No, I think you’re right on track there. And actually, I think that’s part of the reason why live lectures are more effective than online lectures… because in a live lecture, you as the expert get to see the puzzled looks on the faces. So even if they’re not offering up the questions, you can say, “I think I need to throw in another example.” And students can ask for clarification along the way, so that you’re not just going on without them following and getting the concepts that you’re discussing. Lectures are not one-way kinds of teaching methods, but they really are two-way processes. Even though it seems heavier on the expert delivering to the student, the student can be very engaged and also asked to be engaged through questioning and other activities during the lecture.

John: And it’s not necessarily an “either-or” condition… that you can embed active learning activities in the lecture, right?

Christine: And that’s exactly how I would define a dynamic lecture: that you would incorporate what I’ll call brief active learning breaks into the lecture because we don’t want to just talk at students for a really long time… and let’s face it, as faculty, we could do that. And quite honestly, it’s the easiest thing to do, especially when you know your subject really well. And you can just walk in and start talking about your subject matter. But that’s not necessarily going to lead to the highest levels of learning. So when we look at what our learning outcomes are for the course, we need to structure our course in a way that’s going to help students learn and achieve those learning outcomes. So in order to do that, it’s really powerful to build in some brief reflective opportunities for students to engage with the content. And Mayer has really done a lot of work in this space, saying that it’s a cognitive focus that needs to be emphasized more so than an interactive focus. So the breaks don’t always need to be a social or group break. It doesn’t have to be a partner activity or a small group activity. Some of them can be independent activities. The key is that once you get a certain amount of information, you need to process that information and digest it and there are a variety of techniques that you can use to help students really learn that content. One of my favorite studies—which is a little bit disturbing, and in fact, I always say it hurts our feelings when we find out what it actually says—there’s a research study that compares students who had no pause in their lecture. So that the professor just kept talking the entire time sharing all the expertise in an effective strategy and an effective way. And then another condition where the instructor paused three times for two minutes each. So we’re talking about a total of six minutes during the class period that the professor stopped talking and during that time the research study was set up such that the students had to do what’s called a “compare and share” of their notes. They had two minutes to take a look at what their partner wrote down, fill in any gaps that they had, and engage in that. And at the end of the day, what they found out was that the students in the pause condition really outperform significantly students in the no-pause condition and it sounds exciting at first until you realize that “You mean, If I stopped talking for six minutes my students learn more?” like that kind of hurts their feelings. [LAUGHTER] But it’s true. Sometimes especially at the end of a class, we start talking faster and faster and trying to give more information as if that’s going to lead to high levels of learning. We need to keep in mind that students need time to digest and process. And it’s really important that we strategically and intentionally build in those opportunities for our students during our lecture.

John: And as they’re building their own mental models, just giving them a little time to process it and to compare notes takes advantage of peer instruction. You’ve got some reflection going on there, and you’ve got a little bit of retrieval going on there. So there’s a lot of evidence-based strategies that are embedded in that basic activity.

Rebecca: I think it also helps students who might start feeling panicked because they didn’t get everything in their notes… give them a second to maybe fill it in and then they don’t feel so panicked and they can focus again. If you get anxious because you feel like you’re behind, it’s really hard to focus.

Christine: Absolutely, and it is human nature for us. Our attention wanders, no matter how wonderful a lecture is, life is happening to you. Sometimes it’s easy to have mind wandering happen and you don’t want students to be penalized for that happening for a brief moment. So giving them opportunities to get back on track and refocus I think is really important. And John, as you mentioned before, there are several of these great learning breaks that you can use that are very, very much grounded in the research. You mentioned retrieval practice, for instance and we all know about the testing effect and how powerful that is. And I think we focus primarily on taking tests and encouraging quizzing—and that’s definitely an important component of what we should be doing in the way that we structure our classes so that students get to benefit from the testing effect—but quite honestly, we don’t have to grade everything and not everything needs to be called a quiz or a test. But if you ask students to do the classic, one-minute paper, for instance, that really is retrieving the content that they just learned and giving them practice at doing that will make it more likely that they transfer those actions into their world outside of the classroom, so that when they’re studying, they also engage in those same kinds of evidence-based practices.

Rebecca: I think a lot of times when you hear good lecturing, people think about TED Talks and maybe some of the storytelling and things that happen or the visual strategies that are used in those talks. Are there elements of those that come into strong dynamic lecturing in the classroom? Are there things that are missing from those that we should be thinking about in our own classroom?

Christine: I think you talked about something that’s really important: Storytelling. For ages and ages storytelling has been a way that we have learned and I think we have all been on the edge of our seats in a lecture that was based on storytelling. We want to know what’s going to happen next. And the lecture really can become the story of our discipline. And we can weave in personal stories and examples and things to make the content come alive for our students. It really puts it into context for them and helps them identify and see the relevance of the material that’s being discussed in their real world application. So to me, I think storytelling is probably one of the reasons why lecturing is so effective if it’s done well and you are weaving that in and mesmerizing your students with the chapter content. The the key element is doing that effectively. So I would say, “Absolutely, that is great.” Although TED Talks, when you think about them, obviously they’re online and they’re one directional still. So stories can be more just told by the storyteller and not have audience participation or they’re stories where you think back to your days in elementary school, where the teacher would pause and ask for you to get engaged in the story and maybe predict what would happen next, and to think about examples from your own world. And I think that’s what we can do in the live lecture, sitting there with students face to face we can give them those opportunities to do a prediction. “What do you think this research study is going to find? What is the key finding going to be? You heard how the study was set up, what are the implications of that?” You’re getting them to think about it and to be really engaged in the story and participants in the story, I think is one of the areas where we can as faculty enhance the effectiveness of the lecture.

Rebecca: How does a faculty member learn to be a better storyteller?

Christine: I think that some of that’s natural, I think some of us are more naturally better storytellers than others. But one of the strategies that I suggest to faculty is for you as the expert to take a step back and to think about what are the key elements of your story? Or what are your big ideas of your lecture? Because it’s all natural, and it all flows to you as an expert, because you know, this material so well. But for your students who are getting exposed to it for the first time—or maybe on the second or third time hearing this content—they don’t know what the big ideas are. So I think that one of the strategies that faculty can use to become better storytellers is to almost map out what are the many chapters in this book that I’m telling, right? Who are the characters and the main players? What are the big theorists that we’re going to talk about? Or, what are the big researchers that we’re going to discuss? And what are the key variables—or the factors really—that are going to comprise this story? I think one of the most helpful things you can do as a faculty member to strengthen your lecture, is to step back and identify what are the three big ideas or major elements of this lecture for today. And if you’re able to do that, and then clearly communicate those to the students in the beginning and throughout every time that those big ideas are getting introduced, that will really help students hone in on the most important elements versus getting lost in some of the details of the story.

John: That’s one of the ways it helps reduce the cognitive load of the students so they can focus on those key points, without getting lost in the details that they’re not quite ready to incorporate into their models. What do we know about student attention and how we can keep student attention during a lecture? I know sometimes when I have a large class of 3 to 400 some odd students, sometimes their attention will wander. What can be done to try to keep that, a more constant level of attention and focus?

Christine: Well I don’t know what you’re doing, John, I don’t have that problem. [LAUGHTER] No, only kidding. [LAUGHTER] Attention during a lecture as an interesting topic. You know, I’ve been going around the country doing a lot of presentations on dynamic lecturing. And as you know, my colleague and co author, Todd Zakrajsek speaks on this topic quite a bit. He said, “Christine, try this out when you go present. I want you to ask the audience how long a student can pay attention during the lecture.” He said, “Just throw the question out there and see what they say.” And I have done this and he has done this, you know, we’ve compared and shared notes of ourselves and immediately people are throwing out numbers. It doesn’t take very long at all, the numbers usually start out like and hover in that 15 to 20 minute range —although I get, you know, some wise guys in the audience a 90 seconds and some others who are more optimistic, saying larger amounts — but immediately they’re throwing numbers out. So I said to Todd when I was writing the book, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m usually pretty good at finding the research. I can’t find the research on this topic.” I said, “I heard this over and over. I’ve been to professional conferences where the presenter has said 15 to 20 minutes is all that folks can maintain their attention for, so you’re going to have to change things up if you want them to stay attentive and I couldn’t find it.” And we had this really deep conversation about it. And he says, “Now go and ask those audiences, how long would a student be able to pay attention if they were reading” and immediately you hear silence for a minute, because they’re processing and they’re trying to decide how long it would be for reading. So you don’t get answers right away. What almost always happens is somebody says, “It depends” pretty quickly. Or if they do say any numbers — and they do sometimes — they’re usually saying it in a much more tentative voice, lower, not as loud and enthusiastically, and not with confidence. Todd and I will say to our audiences is, “Why is that? Well doesn’t it depend for both the lecture and the reading?” It depends a lot on whether I liked the book, if it’s written in a way that I can understand it, am I able to take it in — if I’m reading a really dense, heavy textbook in a subject I don’t know and I don’t understand what I’m reading — I’m going to be done with that in a couple of seconds. But if I’m reading something that I really enjoy, and I have some background knowledge on and I’m able to take in and I care about, then I’m going to read for hours at end. I mean, you could be on the beach reading all day long, right? The same is true in a lecture. There really is no magical number about how many minutes a student can pay attention to. It depends on how much they care and their personal variables as much as the professor variables. Obviously, the attention span would be longer in an interactive, engaging presentation versus a monotonous boring presentation. The folks who talk about the 15 to 20 minute mark, it’s really not based on the research. However, there is some mind-wandering research that does say that students report higher levels of mind wandering in the second half a class as compared to the first half of class. It seems that there is a small drop around that 20 minute mark, that may have been where it came from. But, I have to be honest with you, some areas I can tell you those robust data or we have like hundreds of studies — this is a handful of studies, we don’t have an enormous body of research in this space — but the good news is, is that it started to get people thinking about: “I guess, if we need to keep students attentive, then we need to switch things up.” And I don’t think that was bad practice. Despite it not being founded on good research, I think that the result was probably positive if faculty were in fact incorporating some active learning break that could be advantageous for student learning.

John: Actually, this is a topic we talked about in an earlier podcast. In Episode 16, one of the people we interviewed, Neil Bradbury, had written a paper on attention span during lecture because he was faced with the same thing. He kept being told that you should keep your lectures or videos to 10 to 15 minutes or so at the most. And so he went to try to find the research and he published this in the Advances in Physiological Education a couple years ago. He found that it was based on a study that was really just looking at note taking and it was done in one class and it was based on an analysis of students’ notes and how much they wrote during different periods of the lecture, which had very little relationship necessarily to the importance of what was being discussed and so forth. And that became cited over and over again in other studies, and then people just started repeating it without ever seeming to go back and analyze that. And I think there was another podcast where someone had looked at attention on videos, he was looking at how effective videos of different links were on student learning — it was in chemistry, I believe. There really isn’t much research on a student attention span. And that obviously will vary, as you said, with the quality of the presentation. The students are willing to spend hours watching movies, we don’t see them walking out or starting to chat with their friends 10 or 15 minutes in, normally.

Christine: Right. And I think that some of the online video research that people rely on is sometimes is for non-educational purposes, so they’re looking at the attention span of someone watching a video from a marketing perspective. But when there’s no grade attached, we’re in a different situation. Hopefully we’re with an audience that has some motivation, they’re in the class, they’re in college, so their motivational level, I think, is very different than a consumer. I think it’s problematic that we’re trying to bring all of this really heavy, deep content into these like very brief news clips. But don’t think that this is the way that students are going to learn best. I remember I was working with someone and they were convinced they had to be two minutes or less. I’m like, “What can I accomplish in two minutes or less?” I mean, I can give you a quick news flash, but if you want to have deep learning, we’re going to have to have a deeper conversation. And I suspect you’re going to want additional examples from me, and you’re going to want me to share the relevance and that will actually help you. So, I think online videos are not as engaging as in-person videos. We probably do need to have them maybe in shorter chunks, but the key is is trying to bring their attention back and your initial question was, “How do you maintain their attention throughout?” And one of the strategies I think that we’re all very aware of is that we need a hook or something at the beginning of a presentation or beginning of a class. But we don’t really think about the hook throughout the class. So I advocate for faculty to go back to those three big ideas that I asked them to identify and identify a hook or an attention grabber before you introduce each big idea. It can vary, I get kind of silly in my classes sometimes, and we’ll use hand gestures and things of that nature. But for the faculty member who’s not comfortable doing that, you can do something as simple as saying, “Here’s big idea number two coming your way,” right? Because it doesn’t have to be that complicated. So I think the idea is that our lectures just like textbooks are filled with more important content and less important content and when we’re talking about the more important content, the chapters bring attention to that with bold headings and things of that nature. What are we doing in our lecture to help them see? Where is the bold heading of our lecture? Do they get to see those subheadings? Can they figure that out or are we in a little rabbit hole of detail somewhere… that they don’t necessarily even need all of that information?

John: In one of our earlier podcasts, Alex Butler was using an example where there were certain key big ideas in his class and he used images on that. And he put those images on whenever there was an application of those big ideas. And that sounded like a really nice application continued over the whole semester, not just within a single lecture, even.

Rebecca: I couldn’t help but hear as you were talking, “accessibility, accessibility, accessibility.” because structured content is one of the biggest themes of accessibility — or one of the biggest principles to make things accessible digitally — but you’re talking about the same exact concept in a lecture. What is the skeleton or the outline of what we’re talking about so that people can kind of fill in the blanks? And sometimes you have to make that obvious to someone who doesn’t have the expertise that you have because it’s obvious to you what those are.

John: To develop the scaffolding that they need to make sense of it all to fit it all together.

Rebecca: And an outline is like a scaffolding.

Christine: That’s excellent. Yeah, I love it. That’s an excellent point. That’s terrific.

Rebecca: I was wondering, Christine, if you could talk us through one of your lectures, one of your classes. What does it look like? What does it feel like?

Christine: Sure. So I begin class with an activity called “dusting off the cobweb.” So the first thing that I do is, they know as soon as we walk into the class together, they got to put their books away, their notebooks away, and they need to just rely on their brains to engage in practice retrieval. And the question on the table is, What did we talk about last class? So they have a minute and a half to begin that exercise. And they’re talking with a partner and they’re trying to remember what they recall from last class. After about a minute and a half or so then I have them open up their books and their notebooks and fill in any gaps. So they’re going to continue to talk about What did we talk about? And at this point you hear, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I forgot about that” and I’m sitting out there thinking, “Yeah, I can’t believe you forgot about it, but I’m glad you’re remembering now.” So about three minutes or so passes, and then what I do is I’ll randomly call on students. I’m not a fan of randomly calling on students if you don’t give them processing time… talking about accessibility issues and students with disabilities and processing information in a different way. But after I gave you three minutes to do what I call a fairly low-stakes engagement, I think you’re all fair game. So I’m going to call on you and you’re going to remind us of what we talked about from last class. So now we spent about another five minutes or so recapping some of the highlights. If they don’t mention something that I think is particularly important for us to refresh on, especially given the new content that we’re going to do, then we do that. So I always begin with this because what that does is it activates their prior knowledge so that they’re ready to take in the new information and the new information will be easier to learn because it can stick onto that previous knowledge that they just learned from the last class. So that takes about, you know, five or seven minutes or so. The next thing I usually do in my lectures, I shift to a reading assignment so they usually have some kind of reading assignment — might be a journal article, might be the chapter — and they have questions that they need to answer. This is another activate their prior knowledge kind of activity and holding them accountable for the reading and learning outside of class so that I’m not having to spoon feed everything to them. So now we spend another 10 or 15 minutes where they go over those questions, and this will be with a different partner, and I actually go around the classroom and do spot checking of their assignment while they’re engaged in those activities and I grade them — they’re, you know, low stakes kind of grades, but I grade them nonetheless. So it keeps them on track and it really keeps them focused and interesting that you mentioned that the visual image before because sometimes I’m asking them to do their reading assignments in picture format, like I want them to use either SmartArt or graphics or images because otherwise I find that they’re trying to like copy content that they don’t get. So I’m trying to get them to digest the content as best they can when we’re working together. So then when we’re done with that, now as I spot check, I can see which topics seem to be the ones that they got pretty well. And I still will go over them, but in a much briefer way versus the topics that I could see that they might have been struggling with and they had questions like, sometimes I’ll be walking around, it will be like, “Dr. Harrington, I really didn’t understand this question” and that might be a theme. So then that’s the one that I’m spending a little bit more time on. It’s kind of a very modified version of the intro teaching. It’s not quite exactly following that model but I’m using that reading activity to kind of guide the lecturing and then during the lecture, I will identify what my three big ideas are and I usually do some kind of gesture. So I’ll introduce it with like a gesture about whatever the topic is, get them really excited. I get a little loud and excited, “It’s big idea number one time!” and then I go into the content and then I always have a practice opportunity after it. So after every big idea — and that varies, it might be as simple as a turn and talk or one-minute summary. Sometimes I put them into smaller groups to do like a case study or to develop and answer Socratic questions related to the content. So that piece will vary depending on the nature of what it is that I’m talking about — and I’ll repeat that through the next two big ideas. And then at the end of class I usually will do a very quick — it might be only five minutes — like a preview of the next chapter to make it a little bit easier for them to read. So I’ll highlight stuff, I know that a content’s coming up, let’s say it’s the learning chapter in psychology. I know classical conditioning is often challenging for them to wrap their hands around, I might give them an example and expose them at least to some of the vocabulary and the language that’s going to be in the chapter so that they’re all set and ready to roll with the reading assignment for the next time. That’s kind of what a typical lecture would look like for me.

Rebecca: Thanks. I think a lot of times we often hear some best practices but don’t really take time to think about how that actually plays out throughout an entire class period.

Christine: Mmm-hmm. In the back of the book, you’ll see that there are lots of forms that I have created for faculty and one of them is the sequencing. So, on one of the forms, I’m asking them to plan by identifying: what are the big ideas? How are they going to draw attention to those? What examples are you going to give? What kind of active learning break are you going to give? And then there’s another document that helps them sequence the activity: to always begin with some kind of introductory activity, and then going through those three big ideas and at the end, some kind of concluding activity to get them set for the next learning adventure.

John: Those worksheets and forms that you provide at the end of the book are superb, and that alone is a good reason to buy the book, in addition to all the other wonderful content included in it.

Christine: Thank you.

John: For those people who use multimedia in presentations… who use PowerPoint or visual imagery or perhaps videos, do you have any recommendations on how multimedia could be used or how presentations can be designed to more effectively maintain student attention?

Christine: Absolutely. I think that this is another area that’s gotten the baby thrown out with the bathwater. You see all these sessions, Death by PowerPoint… that PowerPoints are overdone, and sometimes people are rolling their eyes if you’re going to use a PowerPoint. Well again, the PowerPoint is an incredibly effective tool, if it’s done well. If it’s done poorly, it’s an incredibly ineffective tool. We need to make sure we’re using evidence based practices for creating the multimedia, whether it’s slides, videos, whatever tool it is that you’re using. And this is an area that has a robust amount of literature. Mayer has done, I think hundreds of experimental studies on what works best with multimedia presentations and has really found that adding visual images really enhances learning. In psychology, we have a concept called the picture superiority effect, where our memory for pictures is stronger than our memory for word. Something I didn’t mention before in terms of my presentation, my lecture, I always have the PowerPoint as my visual backdrop. It’s not our textbook on slides, it’s really a visual story. It’s kind of like the picture to the storybook. That’s what I view the multimedia presentations to be. So if you look at his research, basically you should have one big giant image and maybe a couple of words associated with that image, and that would be the best PowerPoint slide. And I joke with a lot of my faculty colleagues and I’m like, “Look, I know that I’ve had those slides with so many bullets.” In fact, I’ve heard professional say you’re only to have so many bullets and so many words. Well again, I can’t find any research on any of that. No, stop the bullets, stop the words, go with one big image and just a couple of words. But I said to my faculty colleagues, “I know I too have had slides that had too many words on them. And I’ll tell you exactly why that was the case. It was because I was just starting to teach that class and I didn’t want to forget something. So it was a tool for me, it was not a tool for them. What I learned to do is to have two separate tools, I could still have my additional notes if I didn’t want to forget something. But it is not a visual aid to put it there because it’s not helping them, it’s hurting them.” So to create a powerful presentation really means you need to think clearly about what images are best going to communicate your content, and then to put that up on the board as a visual backdrop, and then take any notes that you need to put it aside and it can be helpful to share those notes. Again, going back to the accessibility issue, if you have notes, why not share them with students? It’s a good idea to share them, but they’re not visual aid for your lecture. Because students can’t do what Mayer called, the redundancy principle. But I actually like to call it the be quiet or shut up principle. We can’t listen and read at the same time. So if you have a slide that has a lot of words, you have students saying, “Hmm, should I be reading this? or should I be listening to what that person is saying? I can’t do both at them same time.” And what usually happens is nothing, so you don’t get anything out of it. If you do have to use a lot of words on the slide, which I think would be a very rare occasion, then you should shut up and let them read it or read it together — I don’t think it matters one way or the other. I’m not familiar with any research that points you in one direction — and then describe it, but don’t talk over your slides. That really is problematic for learning. It’s not even that it’s not helpful, it’s actually harmful to learning.

John: In presentations, instructors will often use some technology to get feedback from the students. What are some effective ways of getting feedback from all of your students or for many of your students, during a presentation?

Christine: Well, I think that the technology tools available today really allow us to engage our students in a new way. So whether you use something like a Poll Everywhere, or a Kahoot! tool or clickers, or asking them to engage via Twitter, there’s so many tools out there that can get students engaged. And I think especially with large classrooms, if you’re trying to lecture, sometimes you don’t know whether they understood the concept that you described. And even asking a quiz question about it, and having them answer it via technology can show you and them whether or not everybody’s kind of on the right track. Now, of course, whenever you introduce technology, you also introduce the possibility of increased distraction. So you have to be mindful. I think that you want to be careful about it. And I think students often respond well to faculty when they believe that you really care about them and are interested in them being successful. So by sharing the rationale and structuring it before you begin to use those tools — and you might even make a joke about it and say, “Look, I’m going to be having you pull out your cell phones but you’re going to also have to put them back, you know, so we’re going to be like on cue here, it’s out, in, you know, like bring them into the class, put them out of the class.” — So I think it is important for us to recognize that the temptation to be distracted is going to be high once we start using their cell phones, because there could be a message on there that they all of a sudden pulls them into a different direction. But the value of getting everyone engaged is powerful and some faculty will even count those to increase their accountability throughout the class and to keep them more focused on the questions if they do count in some way. But I think you have to be careful about that because some students may need more time on task to learn that content. So if I didn’t get it in five minutes, I don’t think I should be penalized. So, it is a tricky process and I think you just need to know your students and what works best in your classroom. But there’s so many great tools out there that really allow faculty to engage students throughout, and engage them in the practice retrieval actions as well.

Rebecca: So one of the things that faculty always want to know is whether or not they’re doing a good job. So how would you recommend faculty get useful feedback about the quality of their lectures and maybe tips for improvement?

Christine: Yeah, I think this is a really important point because I have heard about some faculty actually getting poor evaluations just because they use the lecture. So I think that we have to do a variety of things. First of all, we need to, A: educate our peers, and obviously our chairs and deans and whatnot, about the value of the lecture. And then we need to then figure out well, how can we best evaluate whether or not a faculty member is doing an effective lecture or not? In the back of my book, I also do have a chapter on evaluating lectures and I think that the listeners would probably find it valuable to go through that to see. Because what I basically have done is, taken all of the research-based practices and turn them into kind of self-evaluation or peer-evaluation questions. You can also engage in self assessment as well as the peer assessments, I think both are critical to have you really think about. I think it’s essential that we talk to the person who’s observing us ahead of time so they have context for what’s happening. So to have kind of a pre-meeting that really describes what’s happened and transpired in the class before this isolated lecture that you’re coming into, so that they know any of the story about why it is you might be doing what you’re doing. And also to ask them specifically: “You know, I’m trying out this new brief active learning break, we haven’t done this one before. Maybe we’re going to try asking one another Socratic questions, could you help me be another pair of eyes to see, were people engaged in this? Were they struggling? Were the instructions clear? Were they taking the ball and running with it right away or where they fumbling and not really knowing what to do immediately and needed more guidance?” I think that there are so many strategies, it’s not like there’s a wrong or a right way to do it exactly. I think that the key is, are you integrating the research based practices in a way that supports the learning goals of your class? So really keeping hyper focused on the learning outcome that you’re trying to accomplish that day.

John: So we always end with a question: What’s next?

Christine: Well, I mentioned to you before that I just took on a new position, so I’m now at New Jersey City University. I am a faculty member and also co-coordinator in our brand new (Ed. D.) Community College Leadership program. So as part of this, I mean my primary focus is going to be obviously the launching of this new program, some of this includes curriculum development, and marketing, and recruitment. And I’m really excited to get this program off the ground because we really need to build the leadership capacity in the community college sector, at all levels. So very excited about that. But I do have a new book that I’m going to be writing, I actually just got the contract last week, it’s going to be about the guided pathways movement, which is all focused on increasing student success completion rates. And it’s primarily a community college initiative, although, many of the four year colleges also have been getting into the space, and the book is going to be focused on engaging both full- and part-time faculty in Guided Pathways Leadership. So to get them engaged in this movement, and to really see themselves as leaders in the student success reform efforts… so really excited about that and I have some other potential things in the mix to that hopefully will pan out as well. But lots of great stuff happening for me, so I really appreciate this opportunity and look forward to staying connected with both of you.

John: We really appreciate you joining us.

Rebecca: Yeah, we always have a lot of fun and walk away thinking about a lot of things we can start doing to improve our own classrooms.

John: And you can find Christine’s books at Stylus Publishing, and I believe there’s a discount code available for our listeners.

Christine: Yes, if they put in ETS — which stands for excellent teaching series — 20, they will get a 20% discount on the Dynamic Lecturing book but also the Designing a Motivational Syllabus, and I believe it’s going to work for all the books in the series that will eventually come out. So it will be a 10 book series once all of the books are out and published, but ETS20 would be that discount code.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for joining us. We always have a great time.

Christine: Well, thank you. Always my pleasure, I appreciate it.

John: Thank you.

[Music]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fisher, Chris Wallace, Kelly Knight, Joseph Bandru, and Jacob Alverson.