Monthly Archive for August, 2005

A week ago, I began to have serious misgivings about this experiment. I realized I actually had to decide what I was going to do in class next week. It stopped being a theoretical exercise and became real to me. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to go ahead with this–it would be so easy to just teach the way I’ve always taught, and done a decent job of it I might add.

But the problem was the blog. At least a couple people read this and so I couldn’t just back out. So, I sat down and prepared. It’s hard to think about what meta activities to do in class–to spend the time talking about what I want the students to do, rather than doing it for them. Or discussing what they got out of their own work, and what they need help with.

I am now ready for the first week. (I’ll think I’ll need to prep a week at a time to be ready to either fill time or the opposite, at least until I get the rhythm of the course down.) Tomorrow is the first day of class. I will do the usual getting to know each other stuff, and I will show students where the syllabus is on Blackboard, but I won’t go over the syllabus as I usually do. Instead, I will assign that to them with a quiz on Wednesday. The quiz will count very little but I want to show students I’m serious about them doing the work. I will talk about the experimental nature of the course and I will give them my Practical Economics Quiz to see what they know already. I used my learning schema to construct the quiz and ran it by a number of colleagues to attempt to validate it. I will give it again the last day of class to show students what they have learned. Wednesday I will introduce the two sets of metacognitive activities I hope they will do regularly this semester. I will also explain to them that “Economics is Not Arithmetic,” that there are different degrees of knowing something (with apologies to Benjamin Bloom) and that I hope to lead them to the higher orders of cognition, but that to get there they will need to complete the meta activities. (It doesn’t sound much like economics does it? More on that point below.) Friday, I will lead a discussion on “What is economics?” drawing on what they bring to college, rather than what they’ve read in the text. (The first reading assignment will be for the following week.) I will conclude with a slide show of images illustrating the economic problem: famine in Niger, homelessness in India, and then some scenes closer to home, including the list of fees for a semester at UMW.

I found some words of wisdom on a podcast from the NLII Spring Focus Sessions. Paraphrasing from Bob Beichner’s presentation, my goal this semester is to teach my intro students to think. If I can do that, they can learn the economics themselves.

Into the breach.

Bob raised the $64 question in his comment on my initial Radical Revision posting when he asked, “How will this new pedagogy actually play out in the classroom. If it works well, what would the actual classroom dynamics be?”

The short answer is, I don’t know for sure. But I have a couple thoughts on the matter.

This pedagogy is closely related to Just-in-Time Teaching. For those of you who don’t know, JIT assigns students work which they presumably do, and assesses their learning before classtime. The instructor reviews the assessments to determine how he or she will spend class time. Now my assessment will be done at the students’ own pace so it will not likely occur completely before class. But the basic problem for the instructor should be similar–matching class time with content to be covered.

My last posting explained that I’m viewing class sessions as essentially a laboratory experience, where we will do activities that demonstrate the economic content, rather than just hearing about it. So for each topic in the course, and I’m defining these topics broadly as the sections my course outline is broken down into, I plan to have a one or more activities to perform. I will no doubt have to adjust what we do on the fly, either expanding or contracting, but I have some ideas of how that might be done. For example, I can have the students do more or fewer group problems.

I also plan to spend some time (again more or less) modeling the metacognitive activities I want the students to do ultimately on their own. For example, Jerry Slezak suggested making the first few required, leaving the rest optional. A good suggestion! I think I’ll take that a step further and spend class time working thru the first formative assessments of both types (interactive quizzes on each text chapter, and filling in the metacognitive framework for each syllabus topic). The next one or two assignments will be required. The rest will be optional, but hopefully students will have seen their value by then.

I’ve always had too much material to cover in the time available, so I’m hoping this pedagogy will help with that. I plan on keeping to a strict weekly schedule, but exactly what I cover each class will depend on how many questions the students have. Overtime, I hope to have a better sense of what topics they’ll ask questions about and how much time on average it should take.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been thinking pretty widely about how to revise the teaching of my introductory course. To quote Mitchel Resnick,

To take full advantage of new technology, we need to fundamentally rethink our approaches to learning and education, and our ideas of how new technology can support them.

Well that’s what I’ve been doing and here is what I’ve come up with. In the past, my approach to lecture notes was to read all the references I assigned my students and then boil them down to their essence, explaining them in a way, hopefully, that would make the most sense to my students. It shouldn’t have been any surprise then that my students didn’t generally read the books, since I’d done it for them. Long ago I came to believe that the best way to learn something was to work through it myself rather than simply getting the answers from someone else. I think I’ve been subverting that principle with my homogenized lecture notes.

This coming semester, I’m throwing those notes out the window. I will tell my students that they need to read and make sense of the texts on their own, and that I will assume they have learned the material unless they indicate otherwise. I will begin each class by asking for questions about the readings and I will budget time to respond to those questions. But rather than lecturing from the books, the main purpose of class time will be doing what students can’t do on their own, especially teaching and modeling metacognition.

I want students to think about their learning, to make it meaningful to them, and to help them take ownership of it. I have no doubt that this will require more responsibility, time and effort on their part. I realize this is a radical change and I plan to include a fair amount of scaffolding to support the students. First, students will need regular formative feedback to help them assess their learning of the texts. To that end, I will ask them to complete the interactive quiz questions for each chapter, which are available on the text website. This feature is quite good, in that the questions aren’t bad, when students get them wrong, the software walks them thru subsequent tries, and will also email the results to me. While I may give students credit for these doing the quizzes, I won’t grade them per se, since I don’t want to penalize them for attempting the quizzes. How they score is essentially for them, rather than me.

Early in the first week of the course I will introduce them to the notion of metacognition, which I will define as thinking about and assessing your learning. I will point out that experts think about problems differently than novices do—experts think about them in terms of a framework that they already know, rather than as independent data points, perhaps in search of a meaningful framework. Then I will present them with the framework I developed in an earlier posting

The second formative assessment instrument I will employ involves this metacognitive framework. For each of the roughly ten topics in the course, I will encourage students to identify and show how to apply (in a new context from the one presented in the text or class):

• the major concepts
• the major institutional facts or findings, and
• the major theories or models.

I will promise feedback for every student who submits their responses, which again I will give credit for but not grade.

I fully expect most upper class students to drop this course since there are much easier courses to satisfy their general education requirements. But for the students that stick it out, I expect they will learn a great deal, more than most students most semesters. Wish me luck and stay tuned!