Interactive Teaching DVD: Promoting Better Learning Using Peer Instruction and Just-In-Time Teaching

Derek Bok Center

ISBN 10: 0131580302 ISBN 13: 9780131580305

Publisher: Pearson, 2006

Synopsis

How can you engage your students and be sure they are learning the conceptual foundations of a lecture course? “INTERACTIVE TEACHING” introduces Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching–two innovative techniques for lectures that use in-class discussion and immediate feedback to improve student learning.These techniques are now being used successfully in many disciplines.

 

In this DVD, Harvard University physicist Eric Mazur demonstrates the use of Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching. The DVD serves as an interactive workshop that can be used by individual teachers or in group training sessions to learn about these techniques. New and experienced teachers can navigate at their own pace and focus on what interests them most.This DVD will also help you implement interactive teaching in your own classroom.

About this title

Review:

Bill Taylor, Teacher Drew School, San Francisco

"I have been using this on and off in introductory physics (not AP) for about three weeks now. I don't use it every day, but every time I do I am very pleased. With the right questions, the kids really get into it: "That's the ACCELERATION dude, not the VELOCITY!" Music to my ears!"

 

Charlie, Student Harvard University, Cambridge

"One of the unique things about the way the class is taught is that the material sinks in by having to answer something the night before lecture and during the lecture you have to manipulate it several times before you ever even do a problem set, or walk into lab, or do a demo about the material."

 

"Whether or not you had the same answer, you learned the material so much better when you have to teach it. And you are trying to convince the person next to you of your answer, whether it’s you're right and they're wrong or trying to find if you both have the same answer, trying to think of different ways to explain the same thing."

 

"The Peer Instruction technique really coaxes you into internalizing the material much faster...You intuitively grasp things better if you have to explain it to someone else."

 

Rebecca Younkin, Teacher Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

"The students give really positive reactions to Peer Instruction in general. I think they felt it gave them a lot of opportunities to test if they were really learning something."

 

"Students are more confident with the terminology, more confident in class when they have seen the material before. They are more willing to participate in discussions because they know they are not coming into it cold."

 

Howard Georgi, Teacher Harvard University, Cambridge

"[JiTT] is simply a great way of encouraging [students] to keep up and also getting real time feedback from them."

"You almost feel that you’re there talking to the students about what’s going on. And you can see very clearly patterns of things that a lot of people don’t understand. And you can see... that there’s certain individuals who are asking really interesting questions...and then you can go off and contact them."

 

"It’s awfully hard to tell whether a lecture is successful, except by simply seeing who likes it and so that getting things beyond a popularity contest [with PI], to seeing actual give and take between students and faculty, I think, is an exciting prospect."

 

"This is a place where you can use technology in the service of human interactions. And that’s a good thing. The fact that that gives you a way of measuring a certain kind of interaction is something that you really didn’t have before."

 

Eric, Student Harvard University, Cambridge

"When you have to explain the way that you're thinking and the way that you get a right answer to another person, that if anything, reinforces the learning process, more than getting it wrong, because you’re explaining the mechanism behind what you did to solve that problem."

 

Eric Mazur, Teacher Harvard University, Cambridge

"The questions were a tool to look inside yourself and ask what you didn't understand. Because you don't do that unless you're asked. The most valuable feedback from the responses that I get is to discover what they find difficult in the material. It is often very different from what I thought they would find difficult. It’s an excellent way to zoom in on their difficulty and respond better to their needs."

 

"The way the brain stores information is by storing models. You try to make a conceptual model of what you see, try to explain the things you see, by finding relationships between the parameters. You try to see this in a larger context and understand the fundamental reasons. And in a sense, this process, this engagement, this teaching by questioning rather than by telling, forces students to develop these models in the classroom rather than basically writing down what I write on the board... So the idea is now, rather than having just this passive transfer of information, and then having the student think, “I’ll try to understand it later,” to start some of this model building, this development of models, right in the classroom, in my presence, where I can help them develop the right models."

About this edition

• Publisher: Pearson
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0131580302
• ISBN 13: 9780131580305
• Binding: DVD
• Edition number: 1