Each time I have been able to talk with an expert about how they are making learning active in their classroom, I have walked away from the conversation inspired.

I have been contemplating putting some guidebooks together that curate content from Teaching in Higher Ed (past podcast episodes and blog posts), as well as from other sources. Rather than waiting until I take action on that, I put something together in a blog post.

Here are some ways to leverage active learning in your teaching:

Learn About Learning

Before attempting to modify how you teach, it is well worth spending time discovering what the research says about how we learn. When Saundra McGuire was on the show to share about her book: Teach Students How to Learn, she reminded us that “Learning is a process, not an activity.”

Episode #132 with Saundra McGuire: Teach Students How to Learn

Saundra also stressed how important it is for us to believe in our students' capacity. When we believe that they are capable of great things, it translates into our teaching.

Another resource that has been recommended many times on the show is:

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel

Get Started

It can be overwhelming to think about completely altering how we teach. Instead, think small and start with a few approaches that can yield big results. In James Lang’s Small Teaching, he provides ample techniques we can use. One of his many approaches that keeps rattling around in my brain involves prediction. I try to regularly ask in my classes now, “…and what do you think happened next?” – “…what do you think would happen if…” – “…when this company did that, what results do you think they saw?” and so on…

Episode #92 with James Lang: Small Teaching

James also wrote a series for The Chronicle on the first five minutes of class and the last five minutes of class as other ways to do small teaching.

Cathy Davidson gives us even more ideas for getting started with her post:

What I Wish I Knew When I Started Doing Active Learning

Gather Your Tools

You don't have to use technology to get learning more active in your classroom. Even something as simple as a sticky note offers plenty of opportunities to engage. One approach often used in STEM classes (but one that works in any kind of class) is called peer instruction. Peter Newbury shares about peer instruction on episode #53. Another method is known as retrieval practice. Pooja Agarwal recently came on Teaching in Higher Ed to share about the science behind retrieval practice. Here are some tools I use for both peer instruction and retrieval practice in my teaching:

• Quizlet (including Quizlet live)
• PollEverywhere
• Glisser
• Sli.do
• Kahoot
• Ellen's Heads Up game

I also use a lot of pen and paper activities, as well as sticky notes and even have experimented with Plickers (a digital and analog combo).

Build a Structure

Making a shift from more passive to active learning can be challenging. After you have worked through a few “small teaching” approaches, it helps to build a structure into your course.

Paul Blowers described his environmental science class structure in vivid detail on episode #179.

Chrissy Spencer also has great advice for how to structure large classes to make them interactive on episode #25.

A structure might look something like:

• 00-05 – Activate learning from prior class, create “time for telling” and/or current news related to concept
• 05-10 – Retrieval practice for current module
• 10-15 – Mini lecture
• 15-25 – Mini case or game/puzzle
• 25-35 -Debrief case or game/puzzle
• 35-45 – Mini lecture
• 45-50 – Next steps

Break the Structure

The reason for the structure is to get accustomed to talking less in our classes. Once we have made that shift, we don't necessarily have to structure each class session the same. In fact, it is in the unexpected where opportunities for learning can emerge.

Ainissa Ramirez provided such inspiration on making challenging subjects fun in episode 66. When we attempt to do that, things are likely to get pretty messy. But, Ainissa reminds us: “It's the messy stuff where you learn.”

Be Patient

Some have accused me of making all of this messy teaching stuff look too easy. Teaching requires celebrating the small steps that might one day lead toward greater learning. It means vulnerability is essential and failure is inevitable.

When Yale’s Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Meg Urry, visited Teaching in Higher Ed, she shared just how challenging it can be to correct mental models.

Episode #69 with Meg Urry: Correcting mental models

As she says on the episode, “Real learning takes time.” This is true when we are talking about our students, but especially so when describing our own learning.

Another resource to help you with active learning comes from Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching.

Your Turn

What other advice or resources do you have for people looking to implement more active learning in their teaching approaches? 

 

Both of our kids are really into surprises these days.

They enjoy hiding (but don't do it very quietly, so you know exactly where they are). Then, they like to jump out and yell at the top of their lungs:

Surprise!

They get such a kick out of it. Their joy is contagious.

Surprise

Our kids aren't the only ones who should recognize the importance of surprises. I have had some wonderful, challenging conversations with colleagues about how students often experience their classes, the exact opposite of anything unexpected. “We come in and sit down. He lectures for 20 minutes or so. He shows a video from the same content creation company, with examples that are not current. He lectures for a few more minutes and tells us of any upcoming exams.”

It is all way too predictable. We need to infuse our classes with authentic surprises and keep the learners curious about what will happen next. Here are a few sources of inspiration:

Create Times for Telling

Derek Bruff introduced me to the idea of “times for telling” on episode #71. Ever since discovering this approach, I seek out opportunities to present problems, challenges, or something mysterious in my teaching.

Use Prediction

Another technique is to have students be presented with a situation and ask them to predict what happened next. James Lang writes about this in his book Small Teaching. One of my favorite experiences doing this was when I played the first part of a Planet Money podcast called How Four Drinking Buddies Saved Brazil's Currency. The episode starts with an explanation of how the Brazilians had lost all confidence in their currency.

For a while, inflation was so high that grocery stores were raising their prices every day. Shoppers would run ahead of the guy changing the price tags, so they could pay the previous day's price.”

The narrators then explain how Brazil's leaders brought together a group of economists together to make recommendations on how to solve the problem. I then pause the episode and have students get into groups of 3-4 and give their advice to Brazil on how to resolve the price instability. I do this early in the semester to get students accustomed to talking with each other and problem-solving in groups. It also helps them recognize that this class experience will be drastically different than professors they have had who rely primarily on lecturing in their teaching.

Bring a Prop

One of the most memorable classes in my doctoral program involved a guest speaker bringing a gift bag and setting it in the front of the class. He didn't say anything about it, at first. But, we were all captivated by it from the moment he brought it in. He brought in the unexpected. It turned out to be a $10 paperback book – one of his favorites about leadership. We valued it much higher than that because of the way in which he used it to get our curiosity going as to what was inside that bag.

Carry the Lessons Online

Having surprising elements is even more vital when we move to an online platform. When you create a video for your class, create some unexpected elements to capture the learners' attention. Give your students a taste of agency right when they enter your course. When they click on the section of your course that contains the syllabus, include a course trailer that really piques their interest in what they will learn in the class.

Go Somewhere

The feasibility of literally going somewhere will be limited by factors such as class size and campus location. I enjoy having my students meet me at Back Bay. We listen to a podcast and then gather around to discuss what we heard. Sometimes we visit local businesses or non-profits. In cases when moving outside the classroom isn't realistic, I invite guest speakers into the classroom using Zoom.

Play a Game

Another great way to create a surprise element in our teaching is through playing a game. My students absolutely love playing Ellen's Heads Up game as a review for an exam, or to reinforce some newer concepts in a class. It is available for iOS or Android. You can buy a .99 custom deck and create cards to align with your course.

Your Turn

What do you do to bring surprises into your classroom? 

I received a series of questions about open textbooks from a person who attended my keynote at the University of Georgia in October of 2017.

***

Greetings! I heard you speak at UGA about publishing open textbooks with your students and I decided that I had to do this too.

So here I am, teaching a class with 20 undergrads, and this crazy idea to have students research Confederate monuments in the state, and write up a resolution to a specific monument in Georgia that they researched over the course of the semester.

The goal of the book is to document each monuments' specific history as well as allow students to express their solutions as to how they believe the monuments should look in the future.

I know that I will get my students research and writing where it needs to be, but I am totally ignorant to this self publishing process. Looking through the different publication options, I wondered why did you choose Pressbooks over just uploading straight to Amazon?

I do not want to charge any money for the book as I am fearful that my students may think that I am profiting from their work–which I know will not be the case–but that still nagging feeling in the back of my mind. I would love any and all advice that you might have for me regarding the process. I am hoping to include photographs (taken by my students) in the book as well.

Also—I love your podcast in every way imaginable. It re-energizes me daily.

***

Thank you for the edifying words about the podcast. It is inspiring to learn that the keynote I gave at UGA has inspired you and that you have embarked on this journey.

At the end of 2017, I wrote up some details on My First Experience Co-Writing an Open Textbook, in case you haven’t seen that post yet.

You pose some questions that I didn’t address in that post, however. Here are some thoughts about what you asked.

Why Pressbooks?

My experience with Pressbooks has led me to the belief that it is probably the best option out there for creating open textbooks. That being said, I am very new to this process and haven’t done an exhaustive search or extensive comparisons. This open textbook about how to write an open textbook is a good guide and happens to be written using Pressbooks. Another similar and excellent resource is A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students.

Options like using Github or Gitbook to get started with open textbooks seem daunting for those who are less familiar with those tools, already. Since Pressbooks is based on WordPress, people who have done some blogging in the past are likely to feel quite comfortable in that environment.

For those who aren't ready to write their own open textbook, it is well worth exploring the many sites that offer open textbooks that you can adopt as is, or customize. To name a few such sites: Open Textbook Library, KPU's resources and links, and Harvard DART.

What you are describing seems like a perfect use case for Pressbooks. You could create a book on Pressbooks and have a digital version available at no charge to you (or your students).

Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers gives you a look at how this works. His book is available on any computer or device that has a web browser. His book is an example of what’s available with the free version of Pressbooks.

Why Amazon (CreateSpace)?

If you wanted to make a copy of your book available in print, the free version of Pressbooks would not be a good option. There are many options for print-on-demand services and I have also not done too much investigation in this area.

I went with the advice from a guy I met who works for Pressbooks. He said that if I didn’t have any ethical issues with using an Amazon-owned company, that CreateSpace had some good options.

Most of my “heavy lifting” happened in Pressbooks. I used their cover creator and one of their templates for all my design and formatting. Then, I used CreateSpace to distribute hard copies across various publishing platforms (most namely, Amazon).

Charging Students

I completely understand your concern about charging students for a textbook that you would potentially profit from. If I were teaching undergraduates and writing an open textbook with them, I would likely keep everything in digital form via Pressbooks.

My class was a group of doctoral students who were thrilled with the potential of having something they wrote in printed form. As of January 16, 2018, I have made half of what I paid for a Pressbooks paid book. I suspect that I won’t likely make all of it back, but don’t mind losing money on this kind of an endeavor.

I shared with the students that there was a potential for me to eventually make a small sum of money. I had them sign an online document indicating their understanding of that possibility.

What helped me with the potential ethical challenges in this process was that students were not bound to purchase a copy of the book. It was an option that they had if they wanted to buy one. Transparency was essential. Everyone understood my costs and how I was attempting to reduce them or eliminate them in this way.

Many Questions Remain

I know I still have so much to learn about open textbooks. As I was researching your questions, I came across Ingram Spark, a self-publishing platform that uses Pressbooks as its content editor, that looks like it could potentially save me money with having a print and ebook created of my doctoral students’ books in the future.

I wish I would have documented more of the steps that I had to go through in generating all the needed information for the printed and ebook editions. I suspect that come March (the next time I will be co-writing an open textbook with students), I will be scratching my head, trying to remember what I selected the last time I was in Pressbooks and Createspace.

“Mommy. I don’t ever want to die,” our three year-old said to me as we were eating a picnic lunch in our backyard today.

This may seem like a heavy topic for a Monday afternoon, especially for one so young. I understood the context of her question, though. The night before, she had been as close to death as she ever had been, in her short life.

Last night, we were finishing dinner and our son had found the glow stick bracelets that Dave had bought for the Fourth of July a couple years ago. When our son went out into our atrium to see the brightest possible glow, a small bird flew into the house. The bird flew all around our downstairs, as we frantically opened all the doors and attempted to shoo it out to freedom.

During our scurrying about (as the bird eventually made it up to the third story of the house: my loft home office), I kept coming up with a list of people who probably would know how to get a bird out of a house:

• My Mom
• Sandie’s husband
• Maha Bali (I have no idea why she came to my mind in this instant – our minds are mysterious things)
• And (eventually) – the internet

I wanted to call them (or, in Maha’s case, send a Twitter DM), but it seemed a ridiculous thing to do in the middle of the chaos.

Thinking back now, I wish I would have consulted at least the internet, as it would appear that maybe the fate of the bird could have been different. I don’t want to say exactly what happened in the flurry, lest I share parts of the story that others would rather I not share.

Let’s just say that my office is now covered in tiny bird feathers and our kids are asking a lot of questions about death.

The whole experience reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books from my childhood: About Dying, by Sara Bonnett Stein. Our kids got to share how they felt about the bird dying in their own unique ways, including our son’s deep desire to reincarnate the bird and both kids’ description of what they think it is like when people (and animals) die.

Why am I writing about this experience on a blog about teaching?

Because I keep going back to my conversation with Robin DeRosa and my experience writing an open textbook with a class for the first time. Talking with Robin, I was sharing how often I still wrestle with wanting teaching and learning to be more predictable, even though I no longer believe that to be possible in my intellectual mind.

Robin spoke about not thinking that learning is ever happening until things get messy (my word; not hers). She celebrated the sense of agency that comes when students begin to advocate for their own needs and go against what may be prescribed for them within a given learning context. Robin said, “Push back against a teacher is a win for open [education].” Later on, she emphasized that all of this unlearning of the traditional means of “learning” helps students become:

…shapers of knowledge, not consumers of it.”

Open Textbook – Beginnings and Endings

This past weekend, I just finished my doctoral class in which we “threw away” the traditional textbook for a class like this and wrote our own. I cannot tell you that it wasn’t anything but messy throughout the eight weeks of collaboration. Miscommunication happened. Mistakes happened. Misalignment of strengths happened. I invested more time in this class/project than I ever have in all the times I have taught it before, sometimes to my detriment.

You know what else happened?

• Tremendous learning. For every single one of us.
• A book that is the start of a conversation that I hope continues for many cohorts to come after this one.
• Something that everyone who was a part of this project can be proud of (and is proud of) – knowing that they made a contribution to a book that turned out great.
• While the book isn’t perfect, it is more than any one of us could have created in that amount of time (75 pages strong) and is the combination of over 100 years of collective teaching experience being expressed in written form.
• Multiple reports of individuals who recognized through this process how much their voices matter and that they are capable of doing something that they didn’t realize they could do.
• Plenty of dreams and goals being expressed about how individuals can now take these skills and use them in other contexts.

I plan on writing more about the specific learning I am taking away (What tools we used? Suggestions for others who want to attempt this, etc.).

In the meantime, I hope you will mourn with our family that sometimes things happen that you really wish wouldn’t have occurred. But, also celebrate that they give us opportunities to talk about hard topics and be open to what we can learn from our children’s perspectives.

I also hope you will celebrate with a group of doctoral students who gave so much of their time and talents to create a resource for preservice and new teachers, looking to use technology in their teaching. I am especially grateful to the project lead for the book: Matt Rhoads. He was such a gift to me – as well as to the entire cohort.

I will share links to the book in future posts, so you can check it out online, as well as on its own Amazon listing for buying hard copies or Kindle editions. I want to give the students authors a chance to go check it out and share it with their friends, first, and will pass it on to you soon, too. If you want to read more about others' experiences writing open textbooks, Robin's post: My Open Textbook – Pedagogy and Practice is the best resource I have found.

Your Turn

What unexpected things happened for you this term/semester that you are celebrating now, or mourning over and learning through?

I wrapped up my last keynote for the year at the DET/CHE conference. The event didn't require extensive travel. It took me less time to get there than it does for me to drive to work. I got to meet Michelle Pacansky-Brock in person for the first time – and get photo bombed by a new friend in the process.

If you have been reading my recent blog posts, you know that we are looking to start an end-of-year book club. One of the possible books on our list was Confessions of a Public Speaker. Since I knew it was highly unlikely that it was going to make the top spot on everyone's priorities (based on the surveys that had been submitted by that time), I decided to read it on my own.

The biggest piece of advice Burken (the author) has for his readers is the importance of practice. All too often, we futz with our slides until the wee hours of the night, to the detriment of investing time in rehearsal. Burken is heavy on stories and a bit lighter on the promised practical advice. From memory, a few other recommendations he makes include:

1. Don't picture your audience naked
2. Tell stories
3. Use a slide remote that has a timer built in (I prefer setting alarms on my Apple Watch)
4. Ask people to move to the front of the room, if your audience is sparse

Advice for Presenters

As I wind down from my recent speaking adventures, I thought I would share some of my advice on presenting.

1. Invest in a wireless clicker to advance your slides, so you aren't tied to the podium.
2. Use Nancy Duarte's advice in Slideology – and have your slides enhance your presentation, not deliver it.
3. Involve your audience in some way – I used Glisser a lot this Fall to take questions, pose questions, and allow people to tweet out my slides as I was presenting.
4. Make your presentation more memorable by thinking like a storyteller.
5. Build a resources page for after your presentation, to help people take their learning even further.
6. Use SlideShare to convert your slides to a presentation that can be viewed/embedded online (instead of people needing to download your slides, if they just want to take a peek). Here are my slides over on SlideShare from the FIU Online conference, which are then embedded on that event's resources page.
7. To the extent that it is at all possible, avoid commenting about any technical or other difficulties you are experiencing. The people who are attending your presentation want to get to experience it without having to lose confidence in you, or the event's tech team, due to behind-the-scenes challenges. At one of my recent keynotes, the music for my course trailer example didn't play when the video started. Instead of mentioning that fact, I waited a few seconds and then started humming the best version of Indiana Jones music I could muster. The audience seemed to enjoy it even better than if the music had played. The tech team was then able to restore the sound by the time we got to the next clip. Some may have even thought I planned it this way (though I didn't indicate that).
8. Have a backup plan for when you experience severe technical difficulties. If there's no way for you to display your slides, be sure you have a hard copy of them with you, preferably printed with multiple slides on one page. Here's what I had with me in my bag during my most recent keynote, just in case of any unforeseen issues with projecting the slides during the event. As a side note, I have never had this happen during a keynote talk, but it does happen periodically when I am teaching regular classes.
9. Pause during your talk. Count – one, two… and give the audience a moment to catch up / come back. Silence can be an incredible attention-grabber, if used well. Used poorly, it can be boring – at best – or really awkward.
10. Don't read from notes. If you know your material to be asked to speak on a topic, it is likely that you don't require notes to be able to talk about it. If you follow Duarte's and Garr's advice to only have one idea per slide, you won't have to worry about forgetting one of your points, because you will only have one thing you are talking about per slide.

Dave and I talk more about tools we use in teaching / presenting during episode 88.  Now it is your turn.

What is your advice for presenters?