Students as Active Participants
Art Jipson sets a timer on his Apple Watch to chime 10 minutes before the end of each class. It’s quiet enough that not all of his students will hear it, said Jipson, an associate professor of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Dayton. But those who notice know what comes next: A few minutes later, Jipson will usually pause and say something like “Ok, let’s reflect on what we just did.”
At that point, it’s time for students — not the professor — to distill what was covered in the class period. Jipson carries a list of his own takeaways, but mostly listens and writes down what students say. Then he asks them to describe strengths and weaknesses of the class period. A student might say, for instance, that it covered too much material. The goal is for students to give succinct responses, and Jipson emphasizes that there are no right or wrong answers.
In case students want to say something but are uncomfortable bringing it up in front of their peers or professor, Jipson also provides a way for them to comment anonymously online.
This type of immediate debriefing is called a “hotwash,” a term that appears to have origins in the military and that is now used to describe the way first responders evaluate their efforts in the wake of a disaster. Jipson picked up the technique at a campus center now known as the Institute of Applied Creativity for Transformation, which helps faculty members adopt new approaches in their teaching.
In the classroom, Jipson said, a hotwash serves several purposes, like enhancing student engagement and building community.
Jipson uses students’ feedback on what they thought went well or not so well in a number of ways. For one thing, it allows him to make adjustments in the rest of the course, say, by providing more real-world applications.
The summaries matter, too. When the next class period begins, Jipson refers back to the hotwash, and opens the floor in case students have further reflections to add. Even if students have nothing to add, he said, asking the question helps them form connections, illustrating that “thinking like a researcher, like a scholar, like a writer is always an ongoing process” and that a course is more than the sum of its individual sessions.
Jipson tried a variety of approaches for helping students “feel like they’re active participants in the class” before settling on this one a few years ago, he said. Since adopting the hotwash, Jipson finds himself using it more and more frequently, now ending nearly every class period this way.
While Jipson generally teaches classes of 25 to 40 students — a class size that might particularly lend itself to this kind of technique — it can be adapted for a larger class, he said. He’s done that himself using clickers.
Have you applied a technique from a context outside of education to your classroom? If so, where did you get the idea, how did you translate it, and what benefits does it bring? Tell me about it, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may include it in a future newsletter.
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Getting Rid of Grades
Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, started out as a conventional grader. But then her experiences in the classroom and beyond, her reading of the literature, and — perhaps most of all — her own scholarship on higher education, persuaded her that grades were a barrier to learning. I describe Blum’s intellectual journey and the practice she now uses, a form of “ungrading,” in a new story you can read here.
There are many ways to minimize the focus on grades in a course. Interested in learning more? Check out the helpful rundown of approaches in this blog post from Jesse Stommel, a longtime practitioner of ungrading who’s quoted in my story.
Have you tried ungrading? Do you have questions or concerns about the practice? I’m interested in your thoughts: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Who’s Talking in Your Classroom?
Recently, we asked for your suggestions of online teaching tools that newsletter readers might want to try. Kelly A. Hogan, associate dean of instructional innovation for the college of arts and sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, passed along DART: Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching.
DART analyzes audio recordings of class periods to help professors who want to use active learning gauge their use of class time. It deciphers when one voice, multiple voices, or no voices are heard, providing an estimate of when an instructor is lecturing, assigning students to work in small groups, or asking them to complete an activity on their own. It’s “genius,” writes Hogan, who is also a teaching professor of biology. The tool, she said, can help professors determine how student-centered their classroom really is. You can learn more about using DART here, and read a paper about its development here.
Is there a tool you’d like to share with fellow readers? Send me a note, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may pass it along.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or steve.johnson@chronicle.com.
—Beckie
