What to Consider When Considering Flipping Your Classroom

Susie Kimport

 

Last semester, Fall 2014, I taught calculus in a flipped classroom environment.  Before every class, my students would watch short videos introducing the topics of the day and complete a series of online “prep-problems” for each video.  A few hours before every class, I received a computer-generated summary from our web platform of how my students did on these problems.  The hope was that I could use that data to better tailor examples and in-class activities to the topics with which my students were struggling.

This is normally how a flipped classroom is designed.  The basic idea is to take introductory material out of the classroom and instead use class time for hands-on examples and more interaction between the instructor and the students.   The main difference between my experience and that of most people who talk about flipping their classrooms is that I did not create or choose the videos for my students.  I was teaching as part of a coordinated course and it was our course director who created the videos two years ago.  This meant that I entered into the semester hoping to learn more about the flipped classroom and honestly, to be convinced that it could work, without having to invest a large amount of time into implementation.

While most of the things I noticed during the semester are specific to our implementation and our videos, I think the following three points are valuable to anyone considering flipping the classroom:

1.      Think about content. A pre-class video is another way to present material, just like lecture, demonstrations, or using props in class.

a.       There is some material that lends itself wonderfully to videos.  I loved the videos that meant I did not have to attempt (and fail) to draw 3D pictures on the board.  Many students spoke highly of the videos where the main goal was to derive a formula.

b.      But for the more conceptual ideas?  Videos did not cut it.  Yes, students could pause and rewind, but the explanation never changed.  This meant that some students came to class already extremely frustrated that “the videos didn’t teach [them] anything.” You may want to consider having an alternative explanation or teaching method on hand for difficult concepts.

2.      Think about the in-class experience just as much, if not more, than the videos. Before you flip a classroom with videos, you need videos.  In April, Simona Lorenzini and I will lead a workshop exactly aimed at creating this video content.  But once you have the videos, you have to use them!  The most important questions to ask yourself are:

a.       How do I gauge what my students have learned from these videos?  How can I leverage that to improve the in-class experience for all my students?

b.      How do I make my classroom as active as possible, so students stay engaged despite “learning” the material via videos?

c.       How can I make the constant transition between video and in-class and back again as seamless as possible?

3.      Just because students watched a video does not mean they have learned and internalized everything.  One selling point of the flipped classroom is that it removes some of the tedious lecture from class and therefore allows instructors to do more.  However, the students are not always as far along after watching the videos as you might hope.  Speaking from my own experience, I was often tempted to use the videos and prep-problems to justify (to myself) skipping some more basic examples. 

When I taught Calculus II without videos, I would do 3-4 simple examples in class with the students (let’s say level 1 or 2 for a scale).  If those went well, I would do a couple more complicated problems (say level 3 or 4 if they were really getting it). Last semester, one basic (level 1) example was in the video.  The prep-problems (usually) asked the students to do 2-3 level 2 or 3 examples.  Thus, it often felt natural to start class with a level 3 problem and then dive in to level 4 problems.

The problem with this: students often struggled through the prep-problems and (since they were online) sometimes got the correct answer without internalizing why.  Therefore, starting class at level 2 would have been a safer bet.  If that example goes off without issue, then slowly make your way up to levels 3 and 4.

Overall, I am happy that I tried the flipped classroom and would look forward to doing it again, though most likely with videos I picked out or created myself.  It is a different type of teaching and I think its value comes in how each person can adapt (or steal from) the concept to improve and critically reflect on their teaching, including taking those ideas back to a “traditional” classroom.

Using Film (and Video!) in the Classroom

Claudia Calhoun
Film and Media Studies and American Studies

Everybody loves movies. Teachers across all of the disciplines integrate moving images into their classrooms, whether that means full-length theatrical screenings, television episodes, or videos from YouTube. Incorporating movies is a great way to attract student interest, appeal to different learning styles, and diversify classroom activities. Films can also raise their own questions, deepening content-area discussion.

Every screening, small or large, is also an opportunity to increase students’ visual literacy. Although students enter the classroom incredible knowledge of media, they often have not been asked to look critically, to understand how images create meaning. When you use media, think about encouraging students to develop these critical capacities. This blog post will introduce you to some ways to incorporate visual thinking strategies along with your content objectives.

1. Before you show a video or film, direct students as to what to look for.

Visual Literacy Incorporation Level: EASY.

Films have many elements, and they all move! This can make it hard to keep track. Asking students to pay attention to one aspect of a video will guide discussion toward your learning goals. Let’s say that you’re showing Jimmy Fallon and the Roots’ adaptation of the Sesame Street theme song as part of a lesson within a class on Puppets in Culture. Here are two ways to frame the video:

•  Pay attention to how the theme is adapted for Fallon’s 21^st-century audience. What instruments do they use, and how do they work together?   How does Black Thought’s rap revise the original song?

• Pay attention to the performance of the puppets.  How are the characters arranged, and what is the impact of their placement? How do the human and puppet characters interact with one another in this non-Street space?

 As you can see, these questions will anchor two very different discussions, so be sure to think about what observations are most appropriate for your learning goals.

2. Have students support their observations with visual evidence.

Visual Literacy Incorporation Level: INTERMEDIATE.

Without specialized knowledge, students can use close looking, prior knowledge, and contextual associations to make strong observations.  In the Fundamentals of Teaching with Images and Objects workshops, we use a worksheet to guide a progressive (or “scaffolded”) discussion, which you can adapt for your own uses. You can download that document here.

3. Integrate film terminology into your discussions.

Visual Literacy Incorporation Level: ADVANCED.

You don’t have to be a film scholar, or even have taken an Introduction to Film course, to gain comfort using film studies terms. Learning the terminology is itself productive, as students gain the ability to express new concepts once they have the language to describe them.  There are a number of videos on YouTube that help to explain basic film terminology. One of the clearest and thorough (yet not overlong!) was posted by user Scott Bradley and is called “Intro to Film Technique and Terminology.”

Using scenes from Lord of the Rings, the video clearly illustrates a glossary of film terms. One of the strengths of Bradley’s video is that he also describes the impact of certain choices.  For example, when explaining camera angles, a scene between Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins clearly shows how “Characters shot from low angles tend to be more powerful, commanding” while “Characters shot from high angles tend to be weak, vulnerable” (2:04-3:17).

(If you’re looking for more examples and definitions than Bradley provides, another great resource for film language is Yale Film Studies’ in-depth online glossary, the Film Analysis Guide. )

One note: While The Fellowship of the Ring is a perfect example of “classical narrative” (meaning that all of the formal elements function to support an engrossing story) the film or video for your class may be aggressively un-classical. An avant-garde or ethnographic film, for example, is often not primarily concerned with narrative. Not to worry! The same language applies to non-classical films, and students who come to class with a lifetime’s worth of Hollywood films in their head will be well-prepared to draw out the differences between narrative and non-narrative filmmaking techniques.

To help students dissect an entire film, one strategy that I have had success with is to assign different formal elements to different students in the class. (This is the advanced version of the earlier suggestion, directing students what to look for.)  Before the screening, I will write the terms that we have recently learned on the board (say: lighting, camera movement, editing, sound), and ask students to choose an element on which to focus their attention.  I have found that this greatly improves the quality of the discussion after the film, allowing  us to talk in specific terms about  how each of the elements work together to create meaning – or, even better!,  where elements seem to clash with one another, and that effect that has within the film.

The next time you want to integrate film into a course, consider adding visual literacy to your learning goals. If you ask students what they see, you’ll find out what they think, too!

Have you tried using film and videos in your classroom? What activities did you design? How did students respond?

Active Learning in the Science Classroom

Hello and Happy Halloween!  My name is Ashley and I am a 6^th year PhD candidate in the Genetics department. I came across a great video that takes you inside an active learning classroom at the University of Minnesota and I wanted to share it with you!

http://www.youtube.com/v/lfT_hoiuY8w?autohide=1&version=3&attribution_tag=4dqkMYubkhLg3WJpy7ZprQ&autoplay=1&feature=share&showinfo=1&autohide=1

Still to this day most science classes are lecture-based and rely on transmission-of-information. This traditional way of teaching is not always effective in fostering critical thinking or scientific reasoning.  There has been a new push to reform science classroom dynamics to include active learning strategies and to engage students in the scientific process.  Concept laboratories, or active learning classrooms, as shown in this video are a wonderful example of how a science classroom can be transformed.

 

There is growing literature that shows active learning strategies in the science classroom reaches diverse students and achieves better results than lecture along.  Why then hasn’t there been a rapid movement at universities to revamp the science classroom?  It is possible that professors are unaware of data that demonstrate the effectiveness of active learning strategies.  It is also possible that professors are intimidated by the challenge of learning new techniques and the time it would take to implement these changes.  In any case, it is important that we, as the next generation of teachers, recognize this challenge and hit it head on.  

Reforming science education may not only benefit science majors, it may also help send nonscience majors into society knowing how to ask and answer scientific questions. By participating in a concept laboratory, all students will be capable of confronting issues that require analytical and scientific thinking.  In addition, as noted by several students in the video, this type of classroom environment facilitated teamwork and peer learning.  Instead of passively listening to a professor lecture, these students were working actively and collaboratively to solve problems and answer questions. Dr. Wright, the professor in the video, also noted that she is able to more easily interact with small groups of students and observe how the students use technology and discussion to come up with quality solutions to problems.

 

 

As an aspiring science professor, I hope to contribute to the reformation of science education and I challenge you all to do the same!

"Hot Moments" in the Classroom

Following up on an issue raised in a recent workshop that she co-facilitated, Claudia Calhoun (American Studies and Film Studies) addresses one of the challenges of teaching in a diverse classroom.

A recent Advanced Teaching Series workshop tackled issues of diversity in classrooms and course design. One issue that several participants brought up was the challenge of defusing “hot moments” in the classroom – those moments in a discussion where a student says something offensive, thoughtless, or unexpectedly controversial. These are difficult moments for teachers. When feelings are involved, it can become the responsibility of the teacher to protect all members of  the class – the ones who have hurt as well as the ones who have been hurt.

In our workshop, participants suggested ways in which “hot moments” can become “teachable moments.” Among the suggestions are two particularly worth highlighting, as they can be applied broadly:

1. Take a moment to deconstruct the statement. Ask the student, or the class, to talk about what assumptions that led to that conclusion. 
For example, in the context of a class on religion and society, a student says, "Well, we all know that Mormons are racists and homophobes." To address this issue without placing the student in a difficult situation, the teacher might say, “That’s a provocative statement -- let's turn it into a question.” She might then re-direct the conversation with questions like:

• Looking at contemporary society, what evidence would we gather to defend this position? What evidence would challenge it?
• Where would we look to better understand the forces that shape official church doctrines?
•  Are there any places where members of the church challenge these positions? Where would we look to find these?

 2. Use the literature of the field to stage a debate on the topic. 
For example, in the context of a course on women’s history, a student might say, “But there are some things that women are just better at then men; that’s just biological fact.” A teacher might respond by saying, “This is actually a longstanding debate within women’s history and gender studies.” And he could use the next class to extend the “teachable moment” by:

• Sending out or bringing in two short articles (or excerpts) representing both sides, and staging a debate in class.
•  Telling students that the first 20 minutes of the next class will be a conversation on this subject. Asking students to find an article or blog post that supports their position and be prepared to introduce its main points into the conversation.

During the our workshop, I was happy to see how participants’ suggestions for strategies dealing with hot moments also showed how, in facing these situations head-on, we can model the methods of investigation and inquiry that we seek to teach our students. 

Some of these strategies are also suggested in a document by the Bok Center for at Harvard, “Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom,” which is recommended for those who would like to read more.

Has anyone successfully defused a hot moment in a classroom? What did you learn? What do you think your students learned?

How to spend less time preparing better lectures

Erica De Bruin

Advice for new faculty suggests that, when lecturing on material that is familiar to you, you should spend two to three hours to prepare a one hour lecture. If you’ve given the lecture before, it should take you a half hour or less.

That time frame might seem undoable/possibly insane. The goal of this post is convince you otherwise.

In fact, I’m going to suggest that spending less time preparing can lead to better lectures. This is because excessive preparation can mire you in details that are not essential for students to learn. Research consistently shows that student retention is higher when less material is presented. Excessive preparation also encourages you to fill the entire lecture period with lecturing, which is not optimal for student learning.

So how can you prevent yourself from over preparing for a lecture? Here are some suggestions:

(1) Specify learning goals first

Identifying at the outset how you want your students to be different at the end of the lecture will help you focus your preparation. It will also prevent you from wasting time gathering supporting materials that you won’t end up using. A good guideline is to limit yourself to 2-3 learning goals for an hour-long lecture.

(2) Cover less content

The less content you intend to cover, the less time you will need to spend preparing it. It might be tempting to try to impress the audience with the breadth and depth of your knowledge about the topic, but there is only so much new information that students can process in a given lecture.^[1] So focus on conveying a few ideas well, rather than a lot of ideas poorly. Doing so will allow you to reiterate main points, provide examples, and connect the content to your students’ own experiences—all of which will aid student retention.

If you’re finding it hard to limit the scope of your lecture, consider assigning readings that will provide students will basic facts and background information about the topic, leaving you to focus on the problems, puzzles, and debates that make the subject interesting to you.

(3) Let students do some of the work

Don’t plan to lecture for the full period. Instead, plan mini discussion sections, group work, short debates, or other activities that allow students to engage with the material actively (more ideas here). Since students retain much more information in interactively taught lectures than in traditional ones, it will also improve student retention. (For example, one study found that after two weeks, we remember only 20% of what we hear out loud, but 70% of what we say ourselves.)

(4) Don’t reinvent the wheel

Even if you are preparing a lecture that you have never prepared before, chances are someone has prepared one on the same topic. If you are giving a guest lecture in an existing course, ask the primary instructor for his or her lecture notes and materials from previous years. If you are preparing lectures for a course that has been taught in your department before, ask your colleagues for their materials.

(5) Prepare an outline, rather than a script

Prepare an outline that includes your main points, evidence to support them, questions you want to ask, and activities that you will include, but don’t write out a full script—it’s simply too time consuming. Reading from a script also prevents you from maintaining eye contact with students and can make your delivery sound rehearsed. If you are nervous, consider writing a script for the introduction to your lecture to ensure you start off fluidly, then working from an outline for the rest of the talk.

(6) Embrace imperfection

This suggestion is for those of you who (like me) have perfectionist tendencies. You know who you are! In giving a lecture, it’s okay if you are less succinct than you would be if you wrote the whole thing out. It’s okay if you don’t have the answer to every question that a student asks. (In fact, admitting what you don’t know can improve your credibility as an instructor). In short, it’s okay if your lecture isn’t “perfect.” If you approach each lecture as learning experience and welcome feedback, you’ll take some of the pressure off yourself and be able to continuously develop your skills as a lecturer.

I hope that this post has given you some ideas about how to prepare lectures efficiently, and convinced you that when it comes to lecture preparation, more time will not necessarily lead to better learning outcomes for your students.

Are there any other time saving tips that you have used when preparing a lecture? Please leave them in the comments below!

---

^[1] Russell et al. (1984) compared student retention following lectures in which 90% of the sentences conveyed new information to lectures in which 70% and 50% did. The authors found that students learned and retained the most information when the least amount was presented.

“Choice Architecture” and Teaching

Do you think that the choices your students make shape what they get out of your class?  Most teachers, if not all, would respond to that question with a rousing “Of course!”  Now, don’t you wish there was an easy way to get them to make better choices?  I’m Celia, a PhD candidate in Political Science and a Fellow with the Yale Teaching Center, and today I’m going to describe why thinking of yourself as a “choice architect” might help.

“Choice architecture” is not simply about physical buildings and structures (although they do play a role).  Rather, choice architecture is about the norms, habits, practices, and patterns that structure our social, political, and institutional lives.

Of course, these aren’t just my ideas – I’m working with a framework developed by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their recent book Nudge:Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.  While Sunstein is a legal scholar and Thaler is a behavioral economist, political scientists frequently draw on Sunstein and Thaler’s work as well.  What do all these disciplines have in common?  They all share a concern with how people make choices and the factors that determine whether those choices are optimal or less than optimal. 

Sunstein and Thaler make a few key claims about choices:

• Small changes in context make a big difference in the choices people make.
• Individuals’ “true” preferences are hard to define and often not set in stone.
•  When you are organizing a context in which people make decisions, “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ design.” (Sunstein and Thaler, p. 3)

Now, just think about all the choices your students make when it comes to your class.  Every week, they decide whether or not to do the reading.  They decide whether or not to speak in class.  They decide whether or not to take notes, and they decide whether to be there in class in the first place.  Moreover, they decide what kind of attitude to take – skeptical, engaged, bored, distracted, excited, or domineering.

You don’t have full control over ANY of these decisions.  Sure, you can lay down class rules and determine grades, and these are important instruments for shaping some of your students’ behaviors – but rules and grades are just too blunt to shape every single decision your students will be faced with.  

That’s where choice architecture comes in.  You want to organize your classroom to nudge students towards the best choices.  What are some ways to do that?  Here are a few:

1) Leverage the power of habit.  For example, you want to get your students talking during discussions?  Have them fill out weekly online response forms.  Just the act of writing something, anything about what they’ve read will help get them in the habit of A) doing the reading and B) having something to say about it.  Even if the response forms only account for some small percentage of their participation grade, they can have an outsize effect on student readiness to engage in class discussion.

2) Use social pressure to your advantage.  Split students up randomly into pairs to discuss a question, and walk around the room listening in.  The goal is not to create a high pressure situation, but rather to create a situation where the default is to participate.  Your students will feel more awkward if they sit silently with their partner than if they talk about the readings, especially if they see you walking around and listening in.

3)  Change the physical space.  Consider how you can modify the physical space of the classroom to address any challenges you might be facing.  If you’ve got only a few students in a big classroom, conversation often lags – you could try to get assigned a new room or get to the classroom early and use the chairs to create a smaller area in which to hold class.

Some of my favorite activities are those that combine several of these elements at once.  For example, last semester, when we were reviewing major Supreme Court cases relating to the Interstate Commerce Clause, I came up with a jigsaw activity for my students.[1]   I split students up into four groups and assigned one Supreme Court case to each group.  Each group had just ten minutes to prepare a brief presentation on the case and write an outline of their presentation on the board.  After the first set of presentations, each case would be passed to another group, and that group would have just a few minutes to prepare a presentation on the interpretation of the Commerce Clause in that particular case.  Then there would be a second round of presentations, after which each case would be passed to a third group, who would apply legal principles from that case to a new case currently before the Court.  Before each case was passed, the group about to receive the case would have the chance to ask questions of the group currently in possession of the case.

This activity ended up being a lot of fun – the students were engaged and enthusiastic – so that’s part of why I remember it fondly.  But it’s also a nice illustration of choice architecture in action.  Since students were in small groups, there was some social pressure to participate.  Because the activity involved writing on the board and time pressure, it got students moving and raised the energy level in the room.  Finally, because students had to ask each other questions before the cases were handed from group to group, they started to develop the habit of talking to each other about the material, and not just directing all their comments towards me.

I'd love to hear reactions to these ideas in the comments below.  What are other ways you could apply the principles of choice architecture to your classroom?  How might the features of choice architecture vary across classrooms in different disciplines?  What other insights about teaching can we draw from Nudge, or from other work in behavioral economics and behavioral psychology? 

References:

---

[1] The jigsaw classroom is a form of cooperative classroom learning, so-called because “just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece--each student's part--is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product.”  For more information, see http://www.jigsaw.org/overview.htm. 

Museum as Classroom

Hello Teaching World! I am Alex, a 6th-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department and a YTC Fellow. Today I'd like to tell you a little about teaching with art and, for those of you teaching in or around Yale, the wonderful Yale University Art Gallery, which reopens on Wednesday, December 12th.

Contrary to popular belief, museums are not scary places. Nor are they the private domain of experts, aficionados, and elites. No way! They are for the people, especially the free-of-charge YUAG, which has been from its inception a teaching institution. Better still, the museum has just undergone a substantial renovation and re-installation, nearly tripling its previous size. 

Even if you aren't teaching art history, a museum has much to offer many disciplines from Medicine to Japanese, especially the temporally- and geographically-extensive YUAG. The education department would be happy to help you select material and arrange a visit (contact David.Odo@yale.edu for more info). The objects you select could be similar to your discipline's subject (e.g. medical students looking at medical images) or similar to its methodology (e.g. anthropology students analyzing museum visitors' interaction with art objects.)

In this post, I will focus on the pedagogical benefits of close-looking at art objects.  The cornerstone of art historical methodology is visual analysis -- a close-looking of an object to build an interpretation. Formal analysis is analogous to "close-reading" in literature, but through parsing visual details rather than textual. The benefit of having a real, live art object is that you can look really, REALLY, REALLY closely -- sometimes even with a magnifying glass! This ability allows you (and your students) to more thoroughly understand the artist's choices, the life of the artwork, the chemical basis of the materials, and much more.

The first and foremost pedagogical benefit of a museum visit is how it can add variety to your teaching style. For most, getting out of the classroom is an invigorating experience that can inject any class with new breath. Additionally, a visit will activate  learning styles (VARK) sometimes lost in the classroom -- kinesthetic and visual -- through the sheer physicality of being in a museum and, of course, the visual material. Furthermore, you can use the museum  outside of classroom time, assigning short papers or presentations based on student research and/or observation.

Second, developing critical thinking through close-looking can aid in a student's overall intellectual development. It can make students more cognizant of their visual surroundings -- prompting them to question the images that bombard us daily, ranging from iPhone apps to CNN to fast-food ads. In the classroom, visual analysis provides an analogous method of critical thinking, which students may apply to other disciplines and contexts. The process of building an interpertation based on careful observation can also aid in the development of expository writing or even diagnosis.
 

Alongside this post I have a attached some Instagram photos I snapped at the YUAG last week. With these photos as an example, I would like to suggest a museum activity that you can use with your students, in a class or as an assignment:
1) Tell the students to bring a smartphone to photograph object(s) of their choosing.  
2) Have them also select frames and filters for their images. (Most young folk are very familiar with these photo-editing apps like Instgram, Picfx, or even Facebook).  
3) Depending on your class's subject matter, add a theoretical framework through which they should make these choices. This could be gender, spirituality, historical events, chemistry, physics, post-structuralism -- you name it! 
4) Then have the students present their photos and why they chose the object, composition, frame, and lens with regard to the theoretical framework. 
5) Commence fruitful discussion!

Thanks for listening! I hope you all get a chance to see the new YUAG soon! 

Images:
1. Central Stairway, Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn Building, 1953
2. Benedetto Bonfigli, Christ the Redeemer, ca. 1455–1460  
3. Fukami Sueharu, View of Distant Sea II, ca. 1985 
4. Portrait of a Man, c. 300 A.D., and Portrait of a Young Man, 140-160 A.D., Ancient Rome (in far background: Joseph Wright, Portrait of Mr. William Chase, Sr., ca. 1760-6)
5. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #786A, 1995
 

Classroom Assessment Techniques

This week’s post is written by Claudia, a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Film Studies, and it’s about classroom assessment techniques.

Many of us have learned the hard way that it’s better to test students’ grasp of the material before it’s time to grade their assignments. One category for such tests are called “classroom assessment techniques.” This is the broad term for activities that teachers can do during class time to assess both the quality of the students’ retention and the effectiveness of the teacher’s strategies.

Three CATs to Try

1. Background Knowledge Probe

 Before teaching new material, ask students to make a list of what they already know about the subject area. Collect the lists, and report the results back to the students. At the end of the unit, you can repeat this activity, to show the students how much they’ve learned.

2. Misconception/Preconception Check.

This one is particularly useful if you’re teaching a subject to which students come with prior knowledge that may be incorrect. Consider what common misconceptions students bring to your subject area, and distribute a survey that asks students about these misconceptions. The teacher of a political science class on the Middle East may want to distribute a short survey that tests students’ basic assumptions on the region:

1. Arabic is the language most commonly spoken in the Middle East.
(Isn’t true)		(Might not be true)	(Think is true)	(Certain is true)
2. Islam is the dominant religion in the Middle East.
(Isn’t true)	(Might not be true)		(Think is true)	(Certain is true)
3. Most of the oil consumed around the world comes from the Middle East.
(Isn’t true)		(Might not be true)	(Think is true)	(Certain is true)
4. List the countries generally considered part of the Middle East:

You can conclude this exercise by either correcting the students’ answers or having them research and correct their own answers as a homework assignment. It also may be useful to have a group discussion about where students’ preconceptions have come from.

3. Memory Matrix.

Have students fill in an empty chart, either individually or in groups, to assess their recall of recent material. This helps the instructor know whether students are making the right associations between people, terms and/or ideas. A teacher in a film class may want to give students the following matrix, to work on individually or in groups:

  

	Country of Origin	Major Film(s)	Associated Style
Fritz Lang
John Ford
Vittorio De Sica
Satyajit Ray

The activities above are taken from  Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993). More CATs and more detailed instructions can be found in this book.

Using Online Videos for Teaching In and Out of Class

I spent a very fun week this past summer at the American Association of Physics Teachers  meeting. As a 6th year graduate student in physics who is very interested in teaching, I found it invigorating to be surrounding by other physics-loving teachers. One of my favorite sessions from the meeting was a "YouTube Sharathon" where physics teachers would share their favorite YouTube videos for use in the class along with associated student activities. I came away with lots of exciting ideas for using videos in and out of class that I thought I would share with you here.

I mostly have physics and math examples, but videos are useful for ALL disciplines so I would love to hear your own thoughts on the use of online videos in your discipline and/or your own favorite educational online videos in the comments below!

(1) Connecting concepts to the real world in class
Teachers often say they want to connect course content to the 'real world' to (a) help with students' understanding or (b) make the content more interesting for their students. Using short online videos in the classroom can certainly help with these goals. The entertainment factor is a given (who wouldn't love spending class time watching something!), but making sure the video is effective in engaging students with the content and/or concepts you want them to learn is more tricky.

Teachers should have clear goals and objectives in mind for what they want students to take away from the video and clearly convey these objectives to their students. To help students achieve these objectives, the teacher should plan an activity around the video. These activities can vary greatly, from having students analyze the James Bond airplane stunt in Goldeneye to determine its scientific plausibility, to leading a discussion on the broader relevance of information transfer after watching the 'levitating slinky' video (see below). This experience will certainly be fun for the students, and also provide a great opportunity to connect abstract or difficult concepts to the real (or virtual) world around them.

(2) Learning content outside of class
A popular new style of teaching found to significantly enhance student learning is the flipped classroom - essentially where content coverage is moved outside of class and class time is spent addressing misconceptions and engaging with the material in more depth. Assigned reading is of course one way of pushing content coverage outside the classroom, but students rarely do this reading without extra incentives. Online videos can be a great way to cover out-of-class content, with the incentive that it will actually be entertaining and educational. And, don't worry, there are a lot of online videos that cover content in a more vibrant manner than traditional lecture.

Here are some of my favorite sites to find videos for learning content, and feel free to share your own!

(a) Vi Hart's YouTube channel for math concepts, but to get you started, here's a video exploring binary trees through doodles:

(b) Minute Physics YouTube channel, which addresses a lot of interesting physics questions.

(c) Check out Ted Ed for great educational videos on a wide variety of topics.

Those are my thoughts on online videos in and out of the classroom, but feel free to share your own in the comments section below!