So obviously, classroom discussions, a lot of things happen in your class called classroom discussions. I'm going to talk about classroom discussions with regard to the particular set of multiple choice questions you're going to engage with next. As a brief background and in case you might have heard this. This comes from a technique that is used in the university setting called peer instruction which was developed by Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. The idea is rather than just lecture in class, here's how casting works or something. You actually engage students with challenging questions that they really need to talk about to get them right but you use these clickers to encourage engagement. This is called peer instruction. If you want to hear about how it goes in my classroom in like a two minute video, I'll put the link up next. So why do I do peer instruction in my university classes and why am I going to recommend this really scaffolded classroom discussion at times in your classes? That's because I think a lot of our students think that learning is something that happens in their own head, also they have these terribly fixed mindsets, right? Either I know it or I don't know and I can't learn more, but that's a whole another topic. But the idea is reality is that we construct knowledge about the world around us in the world around us and there are other people and that talking with other people really helps build our understanding. Our understanding is really about the way we use particular things with other people. This is also known in computer science as rubber duck debugging. Well, it's a way you can also apply constructivism which basically says if you explain it to something else it's easier. I'll get there. I've got it even got a great video on it. More on teacher power up but rubber duck debugging, it's a thing in computer science. So these particular scaffolded classroom discussions, what do they look like? So the idea is I'm want to engage students with a very specific question that goes after a really specific piece of knowledge that's important. It's also hard. Okay, it's not like, "Oh yeah. Okay, I got one divided by three." That's zero because its integer division. It's something super hard. So hard for me that in my classes if I could asked students to think about it and commit first, yeah, everyone commits an answer, I only want about 20 or 30 percent of them to get it right. Now, it needs to be something they can get there by discussing with other people. So if you remember that zone of proximal development, yeah, like that. But the next thing we want to have students do is be in groups, two, three, you can decide what the rate number is for your situation, but we want them to discuss the question and verbalize there analysis. I use multiple choice questions so they have specific answers to talk about like, "Well, I thought B was right because- Oh, I thought A was right because- "If possible maybe you want to have students vote again after their discussion to see if they change their answer. But then of course a really important part is sharing out at the end to have the students share their analysis with the whole classroom so that people can learn better analysis skills. Maybe the people you happened to talk to don't have great language skills for doing that. Human can hear that from other people. So you go like, "Maria, tell us, can you give us an explanation why might somebody thinks it's B?" My colleagues in K-12 classrooms do not generally use clickers. Their hardware, paint a handout and get back, whatever. Pear Deck is very popular. It's an add-on for Google Slides. You can have students multiple choice. You can have them type in and you can quickly review their answers. A physical version if you don't want the students on their computers at all is to print out these A, B, C, D voting cards, if you Google that, you'll get one, and then you fold them into quarters and students use the same on all term and you can have them vote by holding their numbers up here. They can see what other people do and that's intimidating sometimes but might work for you. I'd like both of these unlike any form of forcing students to commit to an answer because it encourages engagement. The reality is, if I'm about to discuss it with somebody like, do I really need to think about it for some on my own? Yeah, you do. But we're all, our brains are lazy. That's nature, right? Why expend any extra energy? But if you make me vote by holding up a card, I might think about it a little bit. The other thing is if you can use something like Pear Deck to get a visual of account, and you do a vote of your individual guests and then a vote of your group guests, you will usually have more students move toward the right answer at the end and this shows growth mindset. It shows that we don't all just no computer things but we can learn it.
