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?

Let's Get to the Point: Implementing Two-Sentence Summaries in Your Classroom

Elizabeth Morse

Cell Biology Ph.D. Candidate, Yale Teaching Center Fellow

It's Tuesday night at 7PM, and it’s time to begin another one of your fantastically stimulating discussion sections. The article you assigned your students to read was, of course, academically intoxicating, and somehow, today, you overcame your research or grant-writing to get to this highly anticipated moment. This article represents a pivotal turning point in your field, a cataclysmic push to a new frontier of knowledge; its significance - clearly world-changing.  

 
And so you begin.    
 
“So, who wants to start us off and tell us about this week’s reading?”

Sudden silence. The pre-class chatter about exam results and Facebook and Miley Cyrus has ceased. There are twenty-three faces in front of you, carrying forty-six undergraduate eyes, and not one of them is looking at you. Did you realize how large that stain is on the carpet? Can you believe how many crumbs from dinner are now stuck behind your finger nails? Does the clock on the wall always tick that loudly?

 

Like most awkward silences, this moment was likely preventable. While I do not claim to have the miracle cure-all that will alleviate all of your symptoms of uncomfortable silence, sustained student disinterest or general academic complacency, I would like to offer you a technique proven (in my hands) to increase student engagement, bolster academic discussion and immediately focus student attention on course material. If desired, this technique can be adapted such that it simultaneously gauges initial student understanding (what the teaching world calls “pre-assessment”), takes your attendance and provides an easy means of encouraging – and grading – participation. It does just about everything but walk your dog.

Intrigued? I give you: The Two-Sentence Summary.

  

The Two-Sentence Summary: What Is It?

The beauty of the two-sentence summary is its simplicity: upon entering the classroom, students pick-up an index card and are instructed to compose a concise statement (no more than two sentences) that summarizes the main point of an assigned reading. That’s it. After students have had a few minutes to write, you, the instructor, begin class with a slightly altered version of the question above:

“So, who wants to start us off and share his or her two-sentence summary of this week’s reading?”

 Awesome. By giving students time to quietly think, and by making your initial question slightly more specific, suddenly there are hands raised. You have made your expectations clear, and you have given your students space to compose a response that reflects their current understanding of the material. The section begins with a discussion of the most important, take-home message, and you can immediately assess whether your students identified this point (or points) or will need your guidance to do so.

The Two-Sentence Summary: Advantages for Students and Instructors Alike

In regularly implementing two-sentence summaries in my class, a science section that discusses a primary scientific literature article each week, I observed four key advantages to this activity:

1)     A memorable main point – Countless studies have demonstrated that students learn better when they are actively involved in their own learning – through writing, discussing, participating in group work, problem-solving, etc. (i.e. “active learning”). When asked to critically evaluate the main point of an assignment rather than passively receiving this information from an instructor, students are more likely to remember the take-home message. 

 

2)     Students settle down to summarize – We must acknowledge that this week’s assignment might not be the first thing on our students’ minds when they enter our classrooms. As such, the brilliance of the authors’ experimental methods to determine the infection mode of the bacterium Listeria might not be their current focus. When students enter my class, I typically display a PowerPoint slide with a two-sentence summary prompt and the location of index cards. Without any additional direction from me, students wind down the pre-class chatter and begin to focus on the task at hand. Over time, I even noticed that some students started arriving a few minutes earlier to have more time to review their materials and compose their summaries before class. Ah, the joy of prepared students!

3)     Concise communication – Research from a wide variety of disciplines is often reported in the mass media, on the nightly news or on NPR, in short sound bites. How do we teach our students to accurately – and concisely – summarize important findings, so that no meaning is lost? Practice. Lots and lots of practice, beginning with when they first encounter the pivotal findings of others in our classrooms. Don’t be surprised if you encounter some resistance to brevity. I have had the pleasure of challenging the ninja-like semi-colon that camouflages superfluous independent clauses.

4)     Inclusivity – What I have loved about two-sentence summaries is the environment of inclusivity it creates at the start of class. Students who have struggled with the intricacies of a reading can check their understanding by focusing on the overarching message. As one of my students commented on a course evaluation, “Participation was handled in a way that everyone could contribute even if the information was difficult to understand.” On the other hand, advanced students who have readily digested the material may be challenged to develop the language skills required to concisely craft their statements. 

The Two-Sentence Summary: Adapting to Your Classroom

If you are considering implementing two-sentence summaries in your classroom, here are some adaptations you might consider:

Why, yes, I have attendance records! – Want to monitor attendance without taking extra time out of your class? Have students write their names on their two-sentence summaries and collect them. Voila! You know who was in class (and who did the reading).

Participation: To Grade or Not to Grade? – You might use the two-sentence summaries as an assessment, assigning point values to their completion and/or quality. In a class I taught in which the lead instructor required participation, I used the index card as the physical “ticket” to their participation grade. The first time that a student participated in a given class, he/she turned in his/her index card to me. At the start of class, everyone wanted to get rid of his or her card! This got the discussion rolling right from the start, and also prevented a handful of students from dominating the discussion. As one of my students wrote on the subsequent course evaluation, “I enjoy how my section leader goes out of her way to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to participate.”

 

Pre- and Post-Assessment – Have you asked your students to summarize a finding at the start of class to gauge their initial understanding (i.e. pre-assessment)? Why not collect these summaries, and have them again summarize the finding at the end of class, or at the end of a unit, to collect real data on the effectiveness of your teaching (i.e. post-assessment)? Has your students’ understanding evolved? For the true over-achieving teachers, present the “before” and “after” snapshots to your students to encourage them to be cognizant of their own learning (i.e. “meta-cognition”).

 

The Two-Sentence Summary: A Two-Sentence Summary 

When emphasizing the main point of an assignment or concept, students may be asked to produce a concise summary of the take-home message in two sentences or less. By providing students with time to independently reflect, your students will be more actively involved in their learning, and in your class! 

Tell us about it! If you have tried out two-sentence summaries in your class, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to comment with your experiences or suggestions on this post. 

 

“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:

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[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.