Workshop #4 Review: Advancing Community in the Classroom

On May 13th, Cassandra, Sarah D., Travis, and I facilitated the fourth workshop in the Collaborative Connections series, titled Advancing Community in the Classroom. You may have seen the immediate follow-up post which explored a few online tools and linked to some other resources that were briefly mentioned in the workshop. This post is a more general review of the whole workshop.

Our learning goals for the workshop:

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1. Understand the benefits of active learning and that interactive techniques can be used in any kind or size of classroom.

2. Identify examples of interactive techniques to use in and out of the classroom

3. Practice using interactive techniques that you can use in your classrooms.

4. Identify interactive techniques that you like and can implement in a class you currently teach.

Our agenda of topics we wanted to discuss:

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1. Participation

2. Interactive Techniques

3. Empowering Your Students

4. Classroom and Group Dynamics

5. Collaboration Beyond the Classroom

Before we started on these topics, we wanted to share the rationale behind selecting these topics, as well as some supporting evidence. The following slides were used to introduce the Constructivist Learning Theory and Interactive Engagement to the workshop:

(You can find the references at the end of this post)

The graph deserves some explanation, and we spent a while discussing it with the participants. It shows the percentage gain students showed over a pre-test in various classroom environments. The red points are all classrooms that use no "interactive engagement" techniques, green ones do. In addition, the shape of the point denotes whether the classroom was high school, college, or university. The graph shows that on average, classes which used no interactive techniques made less gains than those that did (compare the red and green trend lines). Participants noted, however, that several green points fell in the range of low gains (and that they were college and university classrooms). Possible explanations offered included:

• Not all "interactive engagement" classrooms are created equally; there was not uniformity in the type or amount of interactive techniques used, which could lead to differing results
• College and University students might not respond as well to these techniques, especially if they have been conditioned to traditional teaching methods.

At this point, we jumped into an activity devoted to participation. After all, you can't have an interactive classroom if your students won't participate! If you've seen the TV show House, you might find the process familiar: we first tried to identify Symptoms of non-participation, then we brainstormed potential Diagnoses, and we then looked for appropriate Treatments. We generated a list of Symptoms and Diagnosed one of them as a large group, and then we split up into small groups to tackle individual Symptoms and tried to find Treatments. As we were doing the activity, we also noted that there might be an intermediate step between Symptom and Diagnosis. We could call it Scanning or Assessment, but it basically boiled down to gathering more information, which could range from doing something informally by yourself or starting a more formal assessment by a third-party observer.

Here's the board after we did the large group discussion. Lots of good ideas!

Each of the small groups wrote out their Symptom, Diagnosis, Treatment process on their own sheet of paper:

The small groups were running so well the TACs wanted to get into the act, and we did our own chart on the board:

After we wrapped up the Symptom, Diagnose, Treatment activity we moved on to Interactive Techniques. As it turns out, we already used and Interactive Technique with the previous activity! We wanted to dive into some more of the background so we could solidify the concept of an Interactive Technique before trying to generate more techniques to try. We relied on an Idea Paper by Fink for our model of Interactive Techniques:

Not to get too ahead of ourselves here, but I want to mention now that the participants quickly found that many (if not most) of their ideas for interactive techniques ended up belonging to two or all three of the categories.

The activity we used at this point is called "jigsawing," and I'll let the powerpoint slide tell the story:

We generated a lot of ideas using this method, and we wanted to organize them and put them on the board. To do this we created a matrix, where we could place each idea in a box according to which type of technique it was (whether it relied on Experience, Reflection, or Gathering Information). To provide another dimension to the matrix, we asked the participants to decide whether each technique was more or less applicable to different types of classroom settings (labs, large lectures, smaller discussion sessions). The next two pictures show the board after we worked through the ideas:

During our discussion we also discussed the advantages and disadvantages to using interactive methods, and those lists can be seen in the first of these pictures. We also noted that throughout the activities to this point, we had been discussing student empowerment and classroom and group dynamics.

After we finished the matrix, we moved on to collaboration outside the classroom. We presented a few starter ideas for using internet resources like blogs and wikis, and the participants brainstormed in small groups to come up with more. We invited them to share the ideas they came up with in this blog post, which also provides more resources that we didn't spend a lot of time on in the workshop itself.

Before we finished, we asked the participants to reflect on the workshop and answer the following question: What is one interactive technique or activity that you have learned about today that you can implement in your own classroom? This is a question that applies equally to those joining us here on the blog! Let us know in the comments.