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Flashlight
Evaluation Handbook: PRS l
Clickers and
polling as a feature of learning spaces l
ARQ Home Page l
ARQ Modules Table of Contents l
These
materials are for use only by institutions that subscribe to
The TLT Group, to participants in TLT Group workshops that
feature this particular material, and
to invited guests. The TLT Group is a non-profit whose
existence is made possible by subscription and registration
fees. if you or your institution are not yet among
our subscribers,
we invite you to
join us, use these materials, help us
continue to improve them, and, through your subscription,
help us develop new materials! If you have questions
about your rights to use, adapt or share these materials,
please ask us (info @ tltgroup.org).
Introduction for facilitators, prior
to faculty workshop: This "Asking the Right
Questions (ARQ)" workshop shows
faculty how to gather feedback from their students in order to
get more value from clickers in their
own courses. The workshop show faculty how to use a
Flashlight item bank in order to create feedback forms
tailored for their own course.
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Draft text for a flier or e-mail about the
workshop: "Do you use
'clickers' or other computer-related ways of
polling your students in a classroom or online? How's that working
out for you? This short workshop
demonstrates a technique for getting (even) more value from
student response systems by asking your students a few
targeted questions after the first week or two of class. You can ask
your questions using an
anonymous survey, by using the clickers themselves, or in
classroom discussion. This workshop should last about 15 minutes,
longer if you and your colleagues have a lot to
discuss with me and with each other. To prepare,
it would be useful for you to read this
short
handout about student response systems
before we meet.
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Preparation before
the workshop:
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Make paper copies of the
Flashlight item bank for all participants.
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Based on the number of
participants, decide how to take notes. Easel?
Table displayed on screen with you or a colleague
typing notes as people speak? Split faculty into
two or more groups with a scribe for each group?
(Ever use a table (spreadsheet) shared over the Web in
order to speed the facilitation of small group work? If
not,
click here to see another hidden TLT
Group treasure.)
Note: as of summer
2008, if your institution is a Network or Comprehensive
Collection, and you would like to test this evaluation
template or run a small workshop on clickers (giving each
participant a Flashlight Online 2.0 beta test account),
please contact Steve Ehrmann (ehrmann @ tltgroup.org).
Facilitating the Workshop:
Opening remarks:
Open the workshop in whatever way feels comfortable and
appropriate. Here's one possible set of opening remarks:
"It's been suggested that, at the heart of
excellent teaching, lies the assumption that all students in
a course can learn, and the practice of trying things as a
teacher,
watching to see what happens with each student as a result,
and then, based on those observations, deciding what to do
next.
"One way to "watch what
happens" is to ask students questions about what they've
been seeing, thinking, and doing. What's clear for each of
them? muddy? motivating? frustrating? puzzling?
Student response systems can be used for this purpose.
"But this
workshop takes it up a level: when you use a student
response system, what can students tell you about what's
happening that would give you clues about how to get more
value from the student response system.
"In this workshop, we're
going to look at a Flashlight item bank that offers a rough
draft of a feedback form, something you can adopt and adapt
in order to ask your own students pointed questions. Their
answers will provide more clues about whether your technique
for using student response is working as you hope, for all
students, and, if not, what you might try next."
Then use
the table to ask participants to quickly describe the
technologies they use for a student response system (e.g.,
show of hands, clickers, survey, online quiz system) and the activities for
which they use their SRS. Take public notes. on a computer
display or easel. Put their initials or the
name of the course in the appropriate cells. The
purpose of this first task is to help participating faculty
see who is using technologies like theirs for purposes like
theirs.
Next, if you haven't already, hand out the
Flashlight item bank for creating
student feedback forms. Make it clear that this is a
construction kit for creating their own customized feedback
form.
Then, question by question, ask participants to imagine asking their own students
that
question. How might their students answer? If students said A, what would you do?
If 2 of them said "B" instead, would that be useful.
The purpose of this discussion is to help faculty select
questions whose answers would be most valuable for guiding
what they do next. Which questions can illuminate
the most important uncertainties?
Conclude by talking about how to build such
a feedback form with the least bother (e.g., by using
Flashlight Online, if that is available to them.). And suggest a way for
the participants to get back to you after they've tried
this, to report on whether the technique was worth the
effort. (If they say it was worth the effort, you'll
probably want to get a record of that, to use when you offer
the workshop again. If enough of them find this not worth
the effort, you're obviously not going to offer the workshop
again!"
(In any case, make notes so you can send us suggestions for
about whether and how to improve this
item bank and these workshop materials!)
NOTE: We're developing this as a
matrix survey
so it will also be possible to have faculty participate in
a community of inquiry, tailoring their surveys to
individual courses while still being able to pool and
compare data across courses and even across faculty
participants. If you'd like help
setting up a matrix survey of clicker use at your
institution, please contact Steve Ehrmann at The TLT
Group's Flashlight Program.
ADDITIONAL STEPS: If your institution
is already making significant use of clickers and other
polling systems, and is a TLT Group subscriber, you might
want to adapt and use
this Flashlight faculty survey, to explore how faculty
are using clickers and what they've learned from the
experience, and the kinds of faculty support they need next.
For information on how to use this survey in Flashlight
Online, email flashlight @ tltgroup.org.
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