Reflection on session "Interactive Teaching"
I went to a session on "Interactive Teaching" which was one of my optional sessions for ADP7101. It was really useful and helped me reflect on my practice in a number of ways.
The first was the revelation that students' attention drops after 15 minutes in a lecture, and only rises again towards the end - unless the lecturer introduces interactive elements (Biggs and Tang, 2011, 137). This brought home to me just how important it is to keep changing perspective and attempting to regain students' attention. When I reflect on this, I realised that I do the same in lectures given by other people, and I sometimes only take notes to keep myself awake. This gave me the idea to introduce "minute papers" as an exercise in my lectures. Currently I give a lecture on "introducing learning and teaching in HE" at the ADEPT induction that is pretty non-interactive. I made this decision as I feel that participants at the interaction are often distracted and pressured, and they just want the information to be delivered without being asked to do exercises. However, the Interactive Teaching session helped me to realise that in fact most of my listeners have probably stopped listening halfway through the lecture (even though it is only 20 minutes long). I decided to introduce a 'minute paper' in the middle of the lecture where I explicitly ask participants to spend 60 seconds writing on a topic and then reflect individually on what they have written. As the purpose of the lecture will be to take them through the first module of the course, I will ask them to write on their own goals for the course and what they want to focus on, and (if they have time!) how they will achieve it. That way I can regain their attention, revitalise them a little and also encourage them to link what I am saying about the module with their own stated goals for development. This may even improve their engagement with the information we give them in the induction, since they will be able to link it to their own interests.
A powerpoint slide where the text is less overwhelming
Caption
This is an example of one of my slides which I improved following the experience of watching my colleague Joe Bloggs lecture. The experience of trying to keep up with the slides with a lot of text on it made me reflect on my own slides and rethink the amount of text. I decided to drastically reduce the amount of text on my slides as a result of this. This also makes the lecture easier to follow for students with dyslexia: as a dyslexic student stated in a 2011 case study at Keele, "the presentation needs pictures, concept diagrams and opportunities for interactive learning."
Cook, Maureen (2011). 'Dyslexia Guidelines for Staff: Advice and Guidance for Staff involved in Teaching, Learning and Support of Students with Dyslexia.' Keele University, Online Resource. URL: https://www.keele.ac.uk/media/keeleuniversity/studentsupport/disabilityservices/images/Dyslexia%20Guidelines%20for%20DLOsdocx.pdf (Accessed 06th Jan 2017).
Interactivity - a major issue
One of the most important things I learned from this observation was the importance of having some form of interactivity in lectures. I had not quite realised how quickly students disengage, but observing the lecture from the back of the room gave me the chance to see what students were doing on their laptops. A lot of them started off taking notes, but as the lecture went on they seemed to disengage, even though the content was really interesting and you delivered it in a clear voice. They started to look on Facebook or search the internet - some of them were even doing internet shopping! Bligh (1971) states, lectures are useful for the delivery of information but not for inspiring thinking - from what I could see, however, even in terms of delivery the lecture was not a good method. So how to make students engage during lectures if we have no choice but to lecture?
One way is to introduce interactive exercises. I had not previously thought that I could do this as a lecturer, because I lecture to large groups (up to 200 students). However, I have found some ways that do not require the students to interact with me, or to shout out in front of the peers, but just to interact with the person next to them. Being able to turn and talk to a neighbour would give them a break from the 'sitting and listening' mode and perhaps keep them engaged for longer, without forcing me to try and organise a large group discussion.
References:
Bligh, D. (1971). What's the Use of Lectures?
Interactivity
This is an example of an interactive exercise that I integrated into a short lecture on 'Evaluation in Higher Education'. It was designed to get people thinking about what we value in higher education - both how it is currently measured (e.g. in league tables) and different thoughts on how it should be measured.
It led to a really great conversation about what different people valued in higher education and whether we are valuing the right things. This was particularly interesting as it was a group from varying backgrounds, so we talked about how higher education is valued differently in different cultures. Several of the participants also actually have younger relatives looking at universities - so we were able to contrast what prospective students see and set it against the perspective of HE staff.
In my discipline, academic practice/pedagogy, it is important that participants are given the opportunity to air their views, as they are often from a variety of backgrounds and come to the sessions with varied intentions. This exercise allowed the participants to talk to one another about their differences and establish points of debate as well as points of agreement.