Workshop attended: Five Easy Steps to Effective Peer Instruction (by Dr. Bennett Goldberg)
Workshop Date: 05/09/2019
Description
Traditional methods of teaching often involve the teaching standing in front of the classroom “passing down” knowledge to students. While these methods were very common in the past and continue to be used in many classrooms, they possess many limitations. Particularly, teachers do not have an effective way to assess student learning in the middle of a lecture and the passive learning paradigm tends to reduce student engagement, interest and learning. In the seminar, Dr. Bennett Goldberg, introduced students to Peer Instruction, which is one teaching method developed to avoid some of the limitations of traditional teaching methods.
Peer instruction builds upon the flipped classroom paradigm, in which students receive reading assignments that allows them to explore the topics at their own pace and revisit topics that are difficult as many times as necessary. On top of the flipped room, the structure of the lecture is modified to include exercises and activities where Peer Instruction happens. The basic steps of peer instruction are:
- A new problem is presented to students
- Students are given time to think about the problem individually
- Students discuss their answers in a group
- Students give a new answer
- Teacher gives expert explanation (if necessary)
After steps 2 and 4, the teacher will often use some way to measure student learning. In this Seminar, Dr. Goldberg encouraged the use of Clickers as an assessment tool. This provides the teacher with immediate feedback on student learning and allows the pace to be adjusted accordingly.
Artifact #1 & Rationale
Worksheet for Reflections and Applications for Teaching and Learning
The worksheet contains some insights I received during the seminar, as well as some reflections and topics that I intend to investigate in the future. The reflections were written by me during a discussion on the seminar following immediately after the Seminar.
Artifact #2 & Rationale
Annotated slides for Dr. Goldberg’s presentation on Peer Instruction
Obs.: parts D and E were not reached during the seminar.
These slides contain examples of good clicker questions and discussion leads to evaluate how well would these questions work. Additionally, they contain notes taken by me during Dr. Goldberg’s presentation.
Using the clickers as a tool allows the instructor to receive immediate feedback from students and the anonymity it provides reduces students’ anxiety and/or shame from answering questions. However, the feedback is only as helpful as the questions (and distractors are). If the distractors are poorly designed, the feedback might be misleading. Therefore, designing these questions involves not only knowing the right answer, but also common misconceptions that students might have.
Interpretation/Reflection
The Peer Instruction method was developed in order to address many of the limitations of traditional methods of learning. Peer-reviewed research has been published indicating that it performs better than traditional methods of teaching. However, it requires much more careful planning and execution to extract maximum results.
Although the flipped classroom reduces some of the onus of the teacher in presenting new concepts and going over descriptions or facts (low levels in Bloom’s taxonomy), now the teacher has to think much more deeply in terms of what questions to ask. Contrary to what it might seem, it is comparatively easier to plan a lecture in which the teacher will spend most of the time talking with few interruptions. On the other hand, while it is indeed faster to cover the material using traditional methods, if students do not learn as quickly as they are “instructed”, there is not actually speed advantage and instead traditional methods are effectively slower.
Peer instruction forces teacher to not only look at the material from the perspective of an expert, but also from the perspective of a learner, considering common misconceptions and conceptually challenging topics. Unless the questions have distractors that are believable, students are not likely to fall for them and the value of choosing the correct answer is diminished. Predicting which misconceptions are most common requires thoughtful consideration of the material.
One of the largest advantages of Peer Instruction is that it increases engagement by presenting students with a situation where they must not simply choose an answer, but also be ready to justify that answer in front of their peers. The deeper analysis allows students to often discover their own mistakes and self-correct, while also understanding why the misconception they had is false. In the group discussion stage, this knowledge also allows students to instruct their peers more effectively. The fact that students are instructing each other also means that there are effectively many more instructors distributed in the classroom allowing for more personalized instruction.
The use of clickers as a way to obtain feedback is also one area of opportunity. By not requiring students to expose to their teacher whether they understood a topic, removes some of the fear of making mistakes, which is something that can interfere with a student’s self-esteem, motivation and engagement. If points are awarded for participation in clicker questions, rather than for correct answers, students feel more inclined to participate and remain engaged.
All its benefits notwithstanding, peer instruction requires a set of conditions to work properly. For instance, a minimum “critical mass” of students must be present in each small group for the peer instruction to work and the correct answer to arise from consensus. Similarly, this also requires students to comply to the “flipped classroom” agreement. This means that the teacher must present the concept early in the Semester (preferably on first day or earlier) and must be consistent in providing motivation for students to keep reading on schedule.
In summary, Peer Instruction is a powerful tool as a replacement for more traditional teaching methods. Its evidence based approach provides many benefits and addresses many of the challenges of traditional methods. However, it also requires thoughtful consideration to obtain maximum results.