What makes for a great lecture? What common obstacles do faculty face when they teach in the lecture format? How can these obstacles be overcome? Can new techniques or technologies help?
These questions were among those addressed by group of Lehigh faculty and staff during a series of seminar meetings in spring 2006. The seminars, part of a new Lehigh Lab initiative called the ITaLLIC Project ( I nnovations in T eaching L arge L ecture I ntroductory C ourses), were based on the assumptions that faculty face common teaching challenges when lecturing to large groups and that these challenges can be overcome when faculty work with peers to jointly seek solutions.
We started this conversation by establishing a basic profile of the classes under consideration, including class size, kinds of the students who take the class (first-year? upper class? majors?), role of the cou rse in the curriculum (is it required? is it a prerequisite?), typical classroom used, teaching staff size, typical assessment techniques, etc. We also shared some course management techniques to address logistical issues that arise when organizing, motivating, and grading a large group of students.
For our next meeting, we discussed some pedagogical challenges faced by teachers of large lecture courses and explored some instructional approaches that have worked in the past. We read and discussed a selection from Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do , in which Bain offers advice on identifying what kinds of thinking we expect of our students and methods of engaging a large group of students to help them learn (follow the NYU link, below, for more information).
In our subsequent meetings, we focused on one course at a time, seeking innovative solutions to challenges identified by the participating faculty. I won't try to  recapture all of the lessons learned or the ideas that were shared across the table because much of our conversation quickly focused on identifying solutions to challenges specific to the courses, but I would like to report on some of the things we are trying out, or planning to try out, in our classes.
Diane Hyland, Gary DeLeo and Jerome Licini all redesigned elements of their courses to incorporate the use of personal response systems ('clickers'). Natalie Foster, though not part of the original seminar, also joined in the ITaLLIC initiative and is using clickers in her current fall course. DeLeo (Physics 1) noted that he is always looking for ways to discern levels of student understanding during lectures and overcome student passivity. Foster (Chemistry 25) was looking for ways to assess student comprehension and help improve attendance. Licini (Physics 1) wanted to become more agile in responding to snapshots of student comprehension by modifying on the fly the material he presents in class and the homework he assigns. Hyland (Psychology 1) was also hoping to better gauge levels of student understanding during lecture and improve attendance, but above all wanted a way to overcome the depersonalized setting of the large lecture environment by soliciting student input and demonstrating during lecture the diversity of student opinion and experiences. Chuck Smith (Engineering 1) is currently exploring ways to revamp his course to address the wide range of student backgrounds and may experiment with clickers in the coming semesters.
Clickers were selected as an appropriate solution to many of these challenges because, when used with suitable questions, these devices can quickly measure and report conceptual understanding, familiarity with content, and student opinions or attitudes. The software can gather data anonymously or keep it connected to a particular student, making it possible to accommodate the wide range of uses identified above. CAS instructional technology consultant Judd Hark, instructional media services team leader Elia Schoomer, and numerous LTS computing consultants and systems administrators have played a crucial role in ensuring that the clicker technology works in the Lehigh classroom and computing environments.
 ITaLLIC seminar participant and co-leader Ed Gallagher designed a new course that would, as he put it, help "cultivate a culture of conversation" even in a large lecture setting. His course, "American Film Essentials" was designed to attract students who might not otherwise take an English course of this type. By offering two seven-week two-credit courses offered one after the other in the fall semester, he was able to give students some additional flexibility to fit the course into their schedules. But his main goal was to create venues in which students could converse intelligently about films. To do this, he now provides opportunities both online and in lecture for guided discussions. Moreover, he also has recorded a number of audio podcasts, made available to Lehigh students on iTunesU, in which members of the campus who are interested in films share their thoughts. It is Gallagher's hope that these audio recordings will help provide his students with a model for the kind of thinking and conversation such films can prompt in an intelligent film viewer, including those whose professional expertise falls far from film theory and the liberal arts. He has already recorded a dozen or so 'cameos,' including appearances by President Alice Gast, Gast's husband Brad Atkins, CAS Dean Anne Meltzer, and CBE dean Tom Hyclak. Gallagher has worked closely with LTS consultants Ilena Key and Robin Deily to carry out this experiment with conversations in podcast-enhanced large lectures. For more information on Gallagher's course, see his article in the current issue of Lehigh Lab Notes.
Bob Giambatista , who teaches Management 280 in the College of Business and Economics, reported that the key challenges in his class are, first, helping students appreciate the complexities of organizational behavior and, second, prompting them to examine and revise their initial perception of what counts as an effective solution to problems related to group decision making. Because students have rarely had a chance to encounter such problems first hand, the course will be redesigned to include an assignment in which small groups of students work together to solve some case-based problem. To connect this small group work back to the lecture, the interactions will be videotaped and displayed during lecture. The goal of the assignment is to illustrate for students common principles of organizational behavior and to train students to carefully observe and constructively critique a group's performance. In addition, Giambatista will develop a library of video clips from movies and television shows that succinctly illustrate group dynamics at work. By having these clips available in Blackboard, students can watch them prior to class and prepare to discuss them, both in small groups and as part of the big lectures. It is Giambatista's hope that the modifications, made with the help of CBE instructional technology consultant Jason Slipp and Lehigh's Digital Media Studio, will help counteract the impersonal environment of the large lecture and help students better comprehend the course material. Because of some staffing and curricular changes to the course, however, his plans have been delayed somewhat, but he nevertheless will move forward with this project shortly.
Susan Szczepanski, who, like Natalie Foster, joined in the project after the completion of the seminar, proposed a significantly new vision for Mathematics 21: Calculus I that arose in part out of her attendance at a Lehigh Lab Forum event ("Managing Quizzes and Homework") last spring. The core challenge she identified lay in how to provide students with a broad set of practice problems while providing timely feedback, without overtaxing instructional staff. By completing practice problems and submitting graded homework using MapleTA-a Blackboard-integrated assessment tool-students will receive immediate feedback on their work. It is Szczepanski's expectation that the quick feedback will have significant pedagogical advantages in helping students catch and correct mathematical errors. In addition, by working closely with Greg Skutches, Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator, Szczepanksi has
developed a series of new written assignments in which students verbally explain their solutions and reasoning. Moreover, because the use of MapleTA has reduced the amount of time spent checking homework for completion and correctness, teaching assistants can instead engage in higher quality interactions with students, including giving feedback on the new written assignments and answering questions in face-to-face meetings both in the traditional Math Help Center meetings and in a series of newly added review sessions. Instructional technology consultants Robin Deily and Ilena Key helped Szczepanski and her TA Joel Mohler with the deployment of MapleTA.
As for me, I hope to put some of these ideas to work in "Philosophy 1: The Examined Life" in fall semester 2007. I'm not sure yet whether clickers are the right tool for this class, but the ideas I gathered about engaging students in a large group setting will certainly be useful. In particular, I am working on some ideas that I hope will bring into the lecture hall more of the best elements of a small seminar-including student-student interaction, congenial debate, regular feedback on individual comprehension, development of writing skills, and the cultivation of philosophical curiosity. This summer, in smaller online versions of Phil1, I used both podcasts (to deliver lectures and offer feedback on student discussions) and a variety of Blackboard tools (to foster discussions, allow students to self-assess their comprehension, and create a journal for students to record their individual philosophical explorations). I plan to bring these elements to the large lecture as well, in the hopes that doing so will free up lecture time for discussion and feedback activities. I believe such changes will allow students to practice articulating complex ideas and conversing about them with their peers, activities I see as central philosophical activities often neglected in large lecture courses in our field. These changes will, I hope, allow students to walk in the lecture room door with a good initial understanding of the material and leave with a more sharply honed set of philosophical skills.
All faculty who have undertaken an ITaLLIC -sponsored course redesign have also developed a plan to test how these changes are working. We will report back on our projects to the campus community in the coming year, in either a Lehigh Lab Forum or Lehigh Lab Notes article. Some of these classes are already underway; others will go live this spring or next fall. Check the Forum schedule and future Notes to see how all of these experiments turned out.
One final thought. It is our hope that these courses make a positive difference in how students learn at Lehigh and that the teaching practices tested here inspire other faculty to consider similar innovations. Faculty who attended the seminar found the exchange of ideas helpful, enjoyed sharing ideas with their peers, and benefited from using the group act as a sounding board for possible changes. I invite all interested faculty to contact any of the individuals involved in these projects or to contact me to get involved in this or other Lehigh Lab projects.
Links to resources on Teaching Large Lectures
http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/LectureTools.htm
http://www.aas.org/education/publications/sixways.html
http://ctl.stanford.edu/Newsletter
Case studies on the uses of Clickers
'Clickers in the Classroom' by Douglas Duncan, University of Colorado (pdf)
Case studies on the uses of Clickers: Univ Texas Austin
Case studies on the uses of Clickers: Univ Wisc. Milwaukee
Videos on Teaching Large Lectures:
NYU's site on transforming large lectures
Patrick Winston (MIT) discussing lecture skills (***Please note that since the publication of this article, this link has been taken down)
Eric Mazur discussing his use of clickers in physics lectures at Harvard.
Lecture Musical by Prangstgrüp
Upcoming Lehigh Lab Forum events:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~infdli/ |
