How I got my students to read the text before class: have them do their reading during class.

Then, the next day, I can lead a discussion among a group of people who have all tangled with the text.

It’s not transformative educational design, but it’s an improvement, with these advantages:

1. It dramatically reduces the amount of time I spend lecturing (a.k.a. reading the students the textbook), so there’s no net gain or loss of class time.
2. The students are filling in the standard comprehension constructor that I use for everything — assessing the author’s reasoning on a rubric.  That means they know exactly what sense-making I am asking them to engage in, and what the purpose of their reading is.
3. When they finish reading, they hand in the assessments to me, I read them, and prepare to answer their questions for next class.  That means I’m answering the exact questions they’re wondering about — not the questions they’ve already figured out or haven’t noticed yet.
4. Knowing that I will address their questions provides an incentive to actually ask them.  It’s not good enough to care what they think if I don’t put it into action in a way that’s actually convincing to my audience.
5. Even in a classroom of 20 people, each person gets an individualized pace.
6. I am free to walk around answering questions, questioning answers, and supporting those who are struggling.
7. We’re using a remarkable technology that allows students to think at their own pace, pause as often/long as they like, rewind and repeat something as many times as they like, and (unlike videos or podcasts) remains intelligible even when skipping forward or going in slow-mo.  This amazing technology even detects when your eyes stray from it, and immediately stops sending words to your brain until your attention returns.  Its battery life is beyond compare, it boots instantly, weights less than an iPod nano, can be easily annotated (even supports multi-touch), and with the right software, can be converted from visual to auditory mode…

It’s a little bit JITT and a little bit “flipped-classroom” but without the “outside of class” part.

I often give a combination of reading materials: the original textbook source, maybe another tertiary source for comparison — e.g. a Wikipedia excerpt, then my summary and interpretation of the sources, and the inferences that I think follow from the sources.  It’s pretty similar to what I would say if I was lecturing.  I write the summaries in an informal tone intended to start a conversation.  Here’s an example:

And here’s the kind of feedback my students write to me (you’ll see my comments back to them in there too).

 

Highlights of student feedback:

Noticing connections to earlier learning

When I read about finite bandwidth, it seemed like something I should have already noticed — that amps have a limit to their bandwidth and it’s not infinite

Summarizing

When vout tries to drop, less opposing voltage is fed back to the inverting input, therefore v2 increases and compensates for the decrease in Avol

Noticing confusion or contradiction

What do f2(OL) and Av(OL) stand for?

I’m still not sure what slew-induced distortion is.

I don’t know how to make sense of the f2 = funity/Av(CL).  Is f2 the bandwidth?

In [other instructor]’s course, we built an audio monitor, and we used an op amp.  We used a somewhat low frequency (1 KHz), and we still got a gain of 22.2  If I use the equation, the bandwidth would be 45Hz?  Does this mean I can only go from 955 Hz to 1045 Hz to get a gain of 22.2?

Asking for greater precision

What is the capacitance of the internal capacitor?

Is this a “flipped classroom”?

One point that stuck with me about many “flipped classroom” conversations is designing the process so that student do the low-cognitive-load activities when they’re home or alone (watching videos, listening to podcasts) and the high-cognitive-load activities when they’re in class, surrounded by supportive peers and an experienced instructor.

This seems like a logical argument.  The trouble is that reading technical material is a high-cognitive-load activity for most of my students.  Listening to technical material is just as high-demand… with the disadvantage that if I speak it, it will be at the wrong pace for probably everyone.  The feedback above is a giant improvement over the results I got two years ago, when second year students who read the textbook would claim to be “confused” by “all of it,” or at best would pick out from the text a few bits of trivia while ignoring the most significant ideas.

The conclusion follows: have them read it in class, where I can support them.