Lesson Plan 7

What students had as an assignment: Assignment 6

[10 mins] Part 1: Introduction to Active Learning

  • Based on the reading, what is active learning, and how do we know if it works.
    • “Active learning is anything more than watching, listening, and taking notes”
  • Def: Instructional methods that elicit student participation.
  • What evidence is out there?
  • Active learning is not the only way to teach. It is complementary.
  • Active learning makes student knowledge visible
  • Students need to learn to apply knowledge.
  • Passive listening is not as engaging. It can also help students feel engaged as part of a learning community.
  • It helps students practice their thinking/transfer skills
  • For instructors, it helps access where students are.

[20 mins] Part 2: Examples

  • Go around the room and discuss examples of active learning that students have participated in in the past.
  • “Advanced reading” this was promoted in Albania, sometimes students would read, but they would not understand. This didn’t work well
  • Examples:
    • Active learning in biology, there was a quiz at the beginning of class. The instructor would expand on material, then the rest of the class would be engaged in active tasks. Also clickers could be used to run polls to have students answer in real time.
    • An instructor took it too far. Students were supposed to “figure it out” and the student didn’t really learn the concepts
    • In elementary school, students were expected to do the homework, and bring their questions to class.
    • In working with boy scouts. Teaching students to navigate the map by navigating to the ice cream shop.
    • In every class, the instructor asks what did you remember from the previous class. It was really helpful.
    • There is a difference between discovery learning and guided active learning. An example of a daughter who’s teaching was expecting her to “figure out” proofs.
    • A teacher showed a mold, but then only after doing a lab on it, were the students instructed about what was happening
    • In middle school, teachers would have students solve problems on the board. They would sometime have students in pairs, and it could be embarrassing if you couldn’t come up with the answer.
    • A paper talks about an experiment in a physics class. One class was traditional, and the other built a car using a simulator to learn about physics.
    • A positive example, as part of the CMU pool club, they would run a Student Course. Seeing beginners learn that you can control the cue ball. Showing them on the pool table is more effective than lecturing on the topic.

[30 mins] Part 3: Different Types of Active Learning from the Readings

  • Which types of active learning did you read about, and which types are you hoping to use in a classroom?
    • Fishbowl approach: 3-4 people do the task, the rest of the class observes them.
    • Muddiest Point: each student says what was the most confusing part of the lecture for them. Very simple and elegant.
    • Think-Pair-Share: doesn’t take a lot of time, students will feel better sharing with the class. Helps students who don’t want to talk to still participate.
    • Predict-Observe-Explain: Students are asked to predict, everyone observes what happens, then students provide explanation. Good examples in CS where the class is acting as a REPL. “What will it do when I run this line of code”
    • Clickers: drawback is extra technology. Provide a lot of feedback about what students understand. With this strategy, there is less room for a student to “hide” if they are not understanding. (Kahoot is one implementation of this)
    • Group activities with set time, with time to think and then write down something before students engage.
    • Self-assessed quizzes: these quizzes often used surprising examples, which would motivate students to engage with the material.
    • Role-Playing: In Intro to ML, the instructor would have students volunteer to classify if they are “dog or cat person”. While terms get forgotten, the principles of decision tree stayed with student.
    • Affinity Grouping: All the students work on the same artifact, and then you would brainstorm certain features of the software.
    • Contrasting Cases: Law and Ethics teachers do this very well.

[15 mins] Part 4: How to Include Active Learning

  • Take a few minutes to think about how you could do this in a science based course.
    • Don’t just add it on top. Make it substitutive instead of just additive.
    • Apply active learning to concepts that students have struggled with in the past.
    • Q: when is the best time to integrate active learning? Answer: for a 50 min class, you need to jump in to the material, and if feels more rushed. Often after 15-20 min, active learning can help break the material up. In an 80 min class, usually start with reviewing the last lecture. Try to make activities every 20 min.

[20 mins] Part 5: What are Strategies to Help Students Participate in Active Learning

  • Ask questions to start the discussion, but start gently.
  • Consider “bad behaviors” and be on the lookout to minimize them
  • Introduce pauses as a way to mitigate people who monopolize discussion.
  • One thing that a student didn’t like in the reading, was calling on someone because they have been “quiet”.
  • One professor discussed how sometimes cold calling works well, but at CMU specifically, the students are very stressed out, and cold calling increases their stress, so the professor doesn’t use that any more.
  • Another professor described a student really struggling when asked to share in front of the class.
  • Speaking up in class is often a real challenge for students who don’t have strong English speaking skills. When a TA moved from verbal communication to drawing diagrams, this was very helpful for students who didn’t speak english well, but were engaging with the course materials.
  • Tactfully correcting wrong answers can be difficult. One strategy is to ask for multiple opinions. That way a wrong answer gets evened out.
  • Non-verbal behaviours are important for that as well. It is REALLY important to not answer your question. Count to 10 in your head. When asking a question, don’t stand behind the podium. Keep eye contact with students.

[15 mins] Part 6: What are the Downsides of Active Learning

  • In a class, the teacher gave 10% of points for people asking and answering questions. People would ask bad questions just for the points. This created a toxic culture for competing for the points.
  • You have much less control in active learning. Students can ask questions that you as the instructor don’t know.
  • Active learning can take longer.
  • Physical Space. If the room has chairs cannot move, it will impact what activities you can do. Think about the physical setup in the room. Do you need index cards?
  • Not everything is taught well via active learning. Sometimes direct instruction is the way to go for some material. You might get bad FCE’s when you get active learning. You can try to explain to students why you are doing what you do.

[10 mins] BREAK

[20 mins] Part 7: Presentations

  • Students are asked to present their learning objectives. In groups of 3-4, for 5 min each student, present your learning objective and any changes you have made to them based on the previous discussion.
  • Show an example of improvement to the rest of the larger class:
    • Example: Compare and contrast between different machine learning vs traditional approaches. Feedback: “what does compare and contrast mean”? How do we evaluate this?
  • Example of learning objective with assessment that comes with it:
    • Formulate a 2-d robot maze as a graph search problem. Assessment: make it as a group activity, share with a different group, and come up with a common answer. Feedback: Formulate might be confusing, maybe “setup up” might be better?
    • Identify and implement basic heap operations in python: Assessment: have students write python code to implement basic heap operations. Feedback: there are questions about how to actually implement that.
    • Apply the golden rule of memory management, that for every memory allocation, there should be exactly one free, to infer good and bad practices around memory management. Assessment: ask students to look at an example. Ask them to find bugs, ask them to find errors.