Analysing interactions in flipped lectures - a lecturer's perspective.
This is a guest post by Ross Galloway, (@RossKGalloway) who is a Senior Teaching Development Officer in the School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh. He is also a physics education researcher and a collaborator on all my research projects – in fact, as the lecturer of the students/lectures I study, I couldn’t do my research without him! This is his perspective on our latest paper 'Characterizing interactive engagement activities in a flipped introductory physics class'.
Over the past academic year I have been fortunate to have worked with Anna on a project based around my first year physics classes, and she has kindly allowed me to write this guest post about it.
The focus of our research project was on what goes on during the lecture sessions; specifically, about the nature of the interactions that occur during the sessions. My lectures are principally constructed around Peer Instruction episodes. I also guide the class through worked examples, attempting to model expert-like processes, and we make use of practical physical demonstration equipment too.
The research focussed on two first year courses that I teach at the University of Edinburgh: Physics 1A in the first semester, and its follow-up course Physics 1B in the second semester. Both these courses have, for a number of years, been taught in the ‘flipped classroom’ format: the students are given clear targets on what they should read and prepare ahead of the ‘lectures’. We have three lectures each week, where the whole class (250-300 students) meet in a large, traditional lecture theatre with one instructor (in this case, me). In addition to the lectures, each student attends one workshop session each week. In workshops, students work in small groups of 5 or 6, with Teaching Assistants circulating around: this allows them to get stuck in to some meaty physics problems and get some practice in applying physics ideas in an environment where they can receive help and support from others.
Lecture Capture
The lecture sessions are routinely ‘captured’ by the university’s in-house lecture-capture system. This records audio from the lecturer’s radio-mic, along with video of whatever is being displayed by the digital projectors (slides, or a feed from the visualiser showing hand-written work; I never use the blackboards). The lecture capture data was critical to this research project, and allowed Anna to identify and code activities and interactions, and – crucially – do so with a time resolution down to the second. This gave us a really clear and detailed picture of what went on during the lectures.
The whole thing was an intriguing experience for me, since I was simultaneously on both sides of the fence: involved in the research project, but also the instructor who was being researched. I fairly often review my lectures by watching the lecture capture recordings; I think about what went well, things I would do differently, explanations that didn’t seem to work, timings that were off, etc. However, having someone else (Anna) critically evaluate and quantify my teaching was a very interesting experience, and extremely valuable. Quite often she would ask me “Why did you do that thing in that certain way?” and frequently the answer was that I didn’t know, or hadn’t explicitly though about it. I believe much of what goes on in the typical classroom is quite instinctive or internalised, and it’s very instructive to have an external observer help you reflect on it.
Results
One interesting headline result from the research was that – even though these are fully flipped classes, structured around Peer Instruction – when you code the lecture session activities by time, around half of the session is spent with the instructor speaking. I already had a sense that quite a lot of the time was spent on my own voice, but I was still surprised by the figure. It also puts an interesting perspective on the roughly 5% of students who, in the end of course survey, make complaints along the lines of “Too much group discussion. You never taught us anything!” I’m sure those students would confidently report that I never ‘lectured’ at all for the whole semester. I think one important distinction is that when I do ‘lecture’ it is further clarification of tricky points or an alternative way of looking at something the students have requested; in keeping with the ‘flipped’ approach, the students’ first encounter with material is never in the form of live lecture during classes. But I think investigating students’ perceptions of what goes on in these sessions (rather than the objective coding we have already done) would be fertile ground for further research.
Perhaps the most striking aspect for me was that this project helped to crystallise in my mind something that I had thought about but not properly resolved. When the students are discussing with each other during Peer Instruction, it’s pretty reasonable to claim that all of them are (or, at least, should be) interacting, and we happily label such activities as ‘interactive’. But what about those situations where the lecturer has extended question-and-answers or discussions with the whole class, where only a handful of the students get to speak? Are those ‘interactive’? Even though most students don’t say anything? Having thought about this at some length, we decided to introduce a hybrid identifier that we called ‘vicarious interactive’: not fully interactive but not passive either.
To get a sense of what ‘vicarious interactive’ means, imagine a discussion involving a large number of people, more than can all comfortably participate in conversation. If someone else asks a question or gives a response, it’s quite natural to think about how you would answer it, or what point you would make. You might not actually speak, but you could have, and you follow along with the argument in an active way. There are multiple points of view involved, and this is quite distinctly different to listening to a monologue, as you would in a traditional lecture. Certainly I recognise these differences in experience from conferences and faculty meetings, and this has given me useful insight into ‘large group’ sessions in the educational context.
Overall, I have found this to be an informative and valuable investigation, and it has given me lots to think about. If this blog post has whetted your appetite, you can read more about it here in Physical Review Physics Education Research (open access).
Analysing interactions in flipped lectures - a lecturer's perspective, by Ross Galloway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Over the past academic year I have been fortunate to have worked with Anna on a project based around my first year physics classes, and she has kindly allowed me to write this guest post about it.
The focus of our research project was on what goes on during the lecture sessions; specifically, about the nature of the interactions that occur during the sessions. My lectures are principally constructed around Peer Instruction episodes. I also guide the class through worked examples, attempting to model expert-like processes, and we make use of practical physical demonstration equipment too.
The research focussed on two first year courses that I teach at the University of Edinburgh: Physics 1A in the first semester, and its follow-up course Physics 1B in the second semester. Both these courses have, for a number of years, been taught in the ‘flipped classroom’ format: the students are given clear targets on what they should read and prepare ahead of the ‘lectures’. We have three lectures each week, where the whole class (250-300 students) meet in a large, traditional lecture theatre with one instructor (in this case, me). In addition to the lectures, each student attends one workshop session each week. In workshops, students work in small groups of 5 or 6, with Teaching Assistants circulating around: this allows them to get stuck in to some meaty physics problems and get some practice in applying physics ideas in an environment where they can receive help and support from others.
The lecture sessions are routinely ‘captured’ by the university’s in-house lecture-capture system. This records audio from the lecturer’s radio-mic, along with video of whatever is being displayed by the digital projectors (slides, or a feed from the visualiser showing hand-written work; I never use the blackboards). The lecture capture data was critical to this research project, and allowed Anna to identify and code activities and interactions, and – crucially – do so with a time resolution down to the second. This gave us a really clear and detailed picture of what went on during the lectures.
The whole thing was an intriguing experience for me, since I was simultaneously on both sides of the fence: involved in the research project, but also the instructor who was being researched. I fairly often review my lectures by watching the lecture capture recordings; I think about what went well, things I would do differently, explanations that didn’t seem to work, timings that were off, etc. However, having someone else (Anna) critically evaluate and quantify my teaching was a very interesting experience, and extremely valuable. Quite often she would ask me “Why did you do that thing in that certain way?” and frequently the answer was that I didn’t know, or hadn’t explicitly though about it. I believe much of what goes on in the typical classroom is quite instinctive or internalised, and it’s very instructive to have an external observer help you reflect on it.
Results
One interesting headline result from the research was that – even though these are fully flipped classes, structured around Peer Instruction – when you code the lecture session activities by time, around half of the session is spent with the instructor speaking. I already had a sense that quite a lot of the time was spent on my own voice, but I was still surprised by the figure. It also puts an interesting perspective on the roughly 5% of students who, in the end of course survey, make complaints along the lines of “Too much group discussion. You never taught us anything!” I’m sure those students would confidently report that I never ‘lectured’ at all for the whole semester. I think one important distinction is that when I do ‘lecture’ it is further clarification of tricky points or an alternative way of looking at something the students have requested; in keeping with the ‘flipped’ approach, the students’ first encounter with material is never in the form of live lecture during classes. But I think investigating students’ perceptions of what goes on in these sessions (rather than the objective coding we have already done) would be fertile ground for further research.
Perhaps the most striking aspect for me was that this project helped to crystallise in my mind something that I had thought about but not properly resolved. When the students are discussing with each other during Peer Instruction, it’s pretty reasonable to claim that all of them are (or, at least, should be) interacting, and we happily label such activities as ‘interactive’. But what about those situations where the lecturer has extended question-and-answers or discussions with the whole class, where only a handful of the students get to speak? Are those ‘interactive’? Even though most students don’t say anything? Having thought about this at some length, we decided to introduce a hybrid identifier that we called ‘vicarious interactive’: not fully interactive but not passive either.
To get a sense of what ‘vicarious interactive’ means, imagine a discussion involving a large number of people, more than can all comfortably participate in conversation. If someone else asks a question or gives a response, it’s quite natural to think about how you would answer it, or what point you would make. You might not actually speak, but you could have, and you follow along with the argument in an active way. There are multiple points of view involved, and this is quite distinctly different to listening to a monologue, as you would in a traditional lecture. Certainly I recognise these differences in experience from conferences and faculty meetings, and this has given me useful insight into ‘large group’ sessions in the educational context.
Overall, I have found this to be an informative and valuable investigation, and it has given me lots to think about. If this blog post has whetted your appetite, you can read more about it here in Physical Review Physics Education Research (open access).
Analysing interactions in flipped lectures - a lecturer's perspective, by Ross Galloway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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