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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Observation 1: You can’t please everyone.

Observation 2: If you can prepare something detailed in writing in advance, it’s more efficient to just give it to the students in advance and let them read or view it on their own time.

Observation 3: Interactive discussions are the one thing that classrooms are optimized for.

Don’t stop the prep work. But if you can lead classroom discussions with safe cold calling, the students with get more out of it. Don’t worry about capturing the results. You could record it, but it’s the process of struggling and discussing that creates learning. Written artifacts are supplementary.

I commend you for both teaching, and for caring enough about your craft to ask for help. The Lifetime value your students can get is enormous.

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One of my favorite classes in college was a physics course taught in this way:

1. Before class, we were assigned to read a chapter from the textbook, understand the material, and complete two or three homework problems from the material we had just self-learned.

2. After submitting homework, lectures focused on discussing the concepts more in-depth. Everybody already had a baseline knowledge, so the professor would highlight the important takeaways, applications, live demonstrations of concepts, etc. I found these lectures engaging because I had already learned the material - and the lectures focused on mastering it.

3. Sometimes there would be follow-up homework problems focusing on advanced applications or derivations. These advanced problems were closest to exam questions.

Some takeaways for me:

- If we didn't have homework to do before class, I doubt I would have consistently learned the material before lecture.

- Lectures taught us more than the "what" - it taught us the "why" and how these concepts related to other areas.

- Lectures focused on answering questions, exploring curiosities (like "what if" questions), demonstrations/experiments, and mastery. The professor added value beyond the written material!

I hope this helps OP because it sounds like they have material prepared beforehand, which means that the lectures could go beyond the material.

Hey, mathattack and philip1209, those are really useful points of view, thank you.

I like this model, but it puts a huge workload on the TA to help with questions about the homework, since the students don't get to hear the professor explain the material until after.

if a student can't learn from a book, the have to first learn to learn from a book.

This method sounds appealing and reasonable. My question would be- did you have a good sense of how many of your peers did in fact do the homework ahead of class- my instinctual fear is that due to this ‘different approach’ many students may not be bothered to do this?

> My question would be- did you have a good sense of how many of your peers did in fact do the homework ahead of class- my instinctual fear is that due to this ‘different approach’ many students may not be bothered to do this?

I took part in an online course where you had to answer 3/5 quick questions correctly before you were admitted to the lecture room.

I think it resulted in an engaged and knowledgeable class.

I've also taken a course where you can't proceed to the next lecture unless you get more than 70% grade on homework from the previous lecture (which you could submit multiple times but it was not multiple choice). This also worked really well.

Homework was required and graded, so I assume everybody did it! It also forced you to attend every lecture because you had to hand in homework on the way in. The professor claimed he would throw away homework from those who dropped it off and walked out. (In reality, with prior communication he was always flexible. )

This sounds fantastic .... but in my experience many students do not read the material as assigned. How did the lecturer manage to overcome that?

> Before class, we were assigned to read a chapter from the textbook, understand the material, and complete two or three homework problems from the material we had just self-learned. [Emphasis mine.]

Grade the students on this?

My favorite course ever had the same structure. It was an elective, with only about 15 3d and 4th year students. Those not up for the reading dropped out. We covered about 20 high quality economic papers in 6 months, quite impressive for a teacher to accomplish that with students. I can pretty much still remember the contents of the course.

There was homework due before class from the material!

I had classes with the same structure. The homework was one of those online setups, and our professor had a policy that we should be ready with questions. If the questions stopped during class, the homework grade would be replaced by the grade on a quiz. The quizzes were fair game every day,were limited in scope,and only happened if the professor decided there was too little engagement.

I took a physics class taught like that last year, and my experience was the opposite. Because the teaching team expected that students had read and understood the material before class (hint: very few people read it, even fewer understood it), the TAs and professors went waaay faster than they should have, and the class was one of the most stressful experiences I've had at college. Nobody liked it.

I had mixed results like that years ago, it was 'repaired' later on by repeating the stuff you should already know, mostly as a verification, but the people that might not have read what they were supposed to read would have a chance to catch up.

Ultimately, it is of course the responsibility of the student to decide what they want to do. If you don't want to learn, see learning as a side-job, or live in an environment that does not leave room for learning outside of college hours, then you might be in more generic trouble anyway ;-)

+1 for cold-calling. What is "safe" cold-calling?

It's of course the kind of cold-calling where you will never have to worry about type-safety or memory-safety. You will never endure a dangling pointer, a use-after-free, or any other kind of Undefined Behavior.

I find it better to develop strategies for 'safe' handling of student input than to resort to cold calling. If a student feels embarrassed because of a response, then not only will they never raise their hand again, but neither will anyone else.

The best way to do this is to try to identify the good part or motivation in a student's statement, regardless of anything wrong that might be in there too. Provide positive reinforcement on that part, and then turn the question back to the group again, with that extra foothold that the first student provided.

Example: Me: "If we wanted to look at every relationship between these objects pairs of these objects, how many relationships would we have?

Student A: "N squared!"

Me: "Sure that's a good start; there's N squared possible two-ples you can form. But I think you may be overcounting a bit; can anyone suggest a way to cut it down?"

Student B: "You don't need to pair objects with themselves."

Me: "Great; so how many are we at, then?

Student B: "N^2 - N".

Me: "Awesome; I feel like we can still cut it down more. Any more ideas? Anyone want to try a small example?"

etc etc...

---

Other bits of advice that come back to me with some writing:

* Provide seeds for ideas, and let the students fill out the flesh.

* Keep the conversation moving around the room. Try to engage a variety of voices.

* Provide at least some positive feedback for everyone who participates. Modulate for effect: eg, bigger praise for more complete, well communicated answers, or for people contributing for the first time.

* If the Super Student blurts out the final answer, take it back to the class and ask if anyone can explain it in more detail.

* Choose good questions. It's easy to ask a question that only you know the answer to... Mix up easy and hard questions, and use the easy questions as a way to 'onboard' quieter students.

Do it well, and there's always going to be enough hands to avoid cold calling. If I genuinely get no hands on a question, it generally means I've asked a bad question; rephrase and ask again. (And on day one, I have a dumb joke where I have everyone "raise your hand if you have a hand" and then do 'reverse' hand raising...)

In my experience, as recent student in the UK, even with that style of questioning people are reluctant to give answers. Certainly it is better than some lecturers that will just pick on people to ask though.

Totally. There's a relationship between the teacher and the classroom, and the students come in with a lot of expectations based on prior classes, too. A big part of the job is building and maintaining that relationship, and changing the expectations in your classroom.

> The best way to do this is to try to identify the good part or motivation in a student's statement, regardless of anything wrong that might be in there too

Your example sounds very reasonable to me, but do you think that this is ever taken too far?

Coming to the US as a student from Europe (not the UK), I noticed that some instructors (mostly TAs) took this effort to give a "positive" response to any answer in class to quite an extreme. I can think of many instances where a student's answer showed a very serious lack of understanding, and the instructor would say something like "okay, that would be one way to think about it, but how about... " without every correcting the student.

Two negative consequences I saw were 1) a lot of missed opportunities for correcting students' misunderstandings 2) students seemed overly sensitive to any kind criticism (I had a German friend who was a TA and had quite a bit of trouble with this)

Again, none of this is incompatible with your advice, I just wanted to take the opportunity to see if anyone has noticed this as a common problem.

Yes, there is a risk there. You need to make sure that you put some phrase in there indicating that the student's answer wasn't really right. Just saying "that's one way to think about it" without clarifying that it's not quite correct for reason X will definitely do more damage than good.

The trick is telling them they're wrong without making it sound like you are calling them stupid.

Yeah, I hear that.

My question in the 'serious misunderstanding' realm would be whether this is a problem that this individual student is having, or is it a common misunderstanding across the class? In the latter case, I turn the question back out to the class, eg, "Who thinks that's the right answer, who thinks it's Something Else?" And then we demonstrate the the individual student isn't alone in the Serious Misunderstanding, and provide a bit of personal buffer between the response and the correction.

I want students to come away with a self-description of "I have lots of ideas, and they need to be carefully checked because sometimes they're wrong," as opposed to the incredibly prevalent "I'm bad at math."

Polls in general are a good buffer to make a safe guess and involve everyone.

It means there’s no shame for a wrong answer. You aren’t grading the response. (I’ve seen classes where participation grades were based on getting facts correct rather than group discussion)

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