Reflections on Clickers - Transcript

Speakers: Melissa Wilde, Sociology and Paul Heiney, Physics and Astronomy

Paul Heiney: I guess for me, I was trying to avoid "The professor delivers the information to the passive students." I wanted something with a bit more back and forth, and so here the students have to think about it and they have to respond. I also find that if the students have to say something and talk to each other, they wake up every five to 10 minutes, as opposed to just writing down everything I say.

Melissa Wilde: Yeah. I decided to use them strictly out of desperation. I was afraid of standing up in front of 400 students for an hour and 10 minutes without enough student participation. And I wanted to get out of the problem of having only a few students engage with me who sat in the very front of the room. I wanted to be able to have a sense of, in a large classroom, what the majority of students were thinking.

Paul Heiney: I have to say for me, it was the other way around. I've given many lectures in a format where I've talked to a lot of students. That wasn't an issue. For me, there was a certain leap of faith in losing some control there over the process. And then, I did it for the first time, and it just worked, and so then there was no looking back.

Melissa Wilde: See, I started with small classrooms and a very participatory format, and so it was trying to take that to a bigger classroom setting, and that's why I decided to use them. And also as a sociologist, I wanted to find a way to gather data quickly, that I could analyze and bring back to them classroom to show them what they were thinking and how that correlated with their background characteristics. And that seemed like the best way to do it, as well.

Melissa Wilde: I would say that clickers were ... initially, I found them to be a wonderful technology. I'm very happy with the way that I ended up using them in the classroom. I think, as with anything, they come with certain costs. You have to know how to use them. For me, when I was teaching a 400-student class, I didn't want to be the person making them work, because when I'm lecturing I need to make sure that I'm thinking about what I'm saying next. So I always had a TA who was responsible for actually pulling up the questions and taking the responses. And I very much liked that model, although that requires that you really lean on your TA. And there are better and there are worse TAs. But by and large, if there were any surprises, I would say it was surprises about how patient the students were and how much they really responded to kind of instantly being able to see the proportion of them that got an answer right, what the other students were thinking, and how well they engaged the material as a result of using them.

Paul Heiney: I'd say it's mostly been successful for me. It certainly is much more enjoyable to teach in that more interactive mode, and the students enjoy it. And I think I accomplish my goal of sort of keeping them awake and thinking about the material instead of just writing down everything. I've now gone through two different generations of technology in using that, two different kinds of hardware, two different softwares, and working basically without a teaching assistant, I've found that each time the amount of work that I had to put in to kind of get things in the right format was more than I expected. So there's definitely a barrier there, even if you think you know what you're doing, just the amount of work that you have to do to get things in the right format. So I thought it was worthwhile, but it was probably more work than I expected to get it functioning.

Paul Heiney: I think the main thing would be to try to get as much feedback from other people who have done it. Maybe sit in some classes, talk to some people, try to avoid some of the pitfalls. And you know, you can sort of start off slow. But one thing that does not work, in my experience, is to just say "Well, every three weeks I'll have a question like this." You have to sort of say, "We're gonna do it in this way." So to some extent, you have to just make the decision that you're going to do it.

Melissa Wilde: And do it almost every class. There are a few classes when you can not use them, but you want the students to have them in their bags all the time, is what I tell the students. If you come with a pen, you come with your clicker.

Paul Heiney: So I've had colleagues in my department who've said, "Yeah, yeah, I used it one time, you know for one lecture, and it was okay." And I'm sort of thinking, well actually, you haven't really used the clickers. You used the hardware, but you haven't really had the experience in trying to teach in that way.

Melissa Wilde: Yeah. And I think more generally, the way that you use it and the way that I use it, is it's a tool to get them to talk to each other and to engage the material. Not so much just a response item.

Paul Heiney: I'd agree with that.

Melissa Wilde: It's much more powerful in relationship to getting students talking to each other in the classroom than it is as kind of just a way to take quizzes.

Paul Heiney: I'd agree with that.