Ludmilla Smirnova's Public Library

generalization

learning may be regarded as the highest

form of social studies learning. Our

purpose here is to identify and to dis­

cuss issues related to the teaching of

generalizations and to stimulate new

rese...

Teachers model living

JSD: Here’s something else you wrote: "Our enthusiasm is infectious. People around us are moved in ways that are subtle but powerful. We become living symbols of a new vision. We send out new signals to everyone around us and, if we are in an organization, our very presence disrupts old routines. A new dialogue is born and the culture in which we are participating begins to change."

Quinn: I have six children, all of whom have graduated from high school. Over the years, I listened to endless discussions of their teachers. Eighty percent of the people they described were experiencing slow death. What kids look at is what they see modeled by the human being at the front of the classroom. Teenagers in particular are very good at picking up authenticity or the lack of it. When they encounter authenticity, they gravitate toward it. When they pick up hypocrisy, they move away from it. What we teach kids is not just subjects but how to live.

Clickers in the Classroom

Student response systems and audience response keyboards, or “clickers,” as they are often called, have been commercially available for the past 15 years, although they were preceded by fixed electronic response systems (Judson and Sawada 2002). Made famous by their use in the TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, clickers are rapidly infiltrating higher education classrooms. They provide instant feedback to students and faculty regardless of the size of the class, and have a clear value in socialization, making impersonal classes more intimate. The technology also seems to resonate with students’ fascination with interactive media.

For years, some instructors have attempted to garner responses to questions by asking students to hold up their hands, say in ConcepTests, as used in Peer Instruction (Mazur 1997). Unfortunately, students regularly alter their votes in front of their peers. This problem is avoided when clickers are used, as they are perceived to be anonymous, making it possible to collect more accurate data in the classroom. If truly anonymous results are desired, the instructor can ask students to switch devices with their neighbor.

Clickers are similar to a TV or stereo remote control, with numbered buttons that students can push to register their votes. Typically students respond to questions framed in a multiple-choice format. Transmitted by either infrared or radio frequency signal, a receiver picks up the answers and then relays them to a classroom computer. The results can be immediately displayed as a chart on the computer screen and projected for the class. The data can be stored and retrieved later, either as an anonymous record or by identification with a personal ID (Greer and Heaney 2004).

Gestalt psychology
suggests that everything comes together in the moment of action, and
if we want to know why and how students are learning then we have
to know how they are making sense of a situation – how they
are relating to what is being learned. This was the very opposite
of behaviorism, a theory that was also very popular at the time. Behaviorism
taught that students would learn best if we rewarded them for it (I
can still remember a woman in my class who was outraged because her
little girl loved to learn but was suddenly given "m & m's
" by her teacher for her right answers). Perceptual Psychology,
as this field also became to be known, believed that people could
change themselves through their own understanding and chosen actions,
something that echoed the beliefs I had developed as an adolescent.

My dissertation
demonstrated that when teachers were trained using Dr. Thomas Gordon's
Teacher Effectiveness Training (using "I" messages and
active listening) and actually used it in the classroom, their students
had a higher self-concept and better attitude towards school and teachers
six months after the teacher changed his or her way of communicating
with students. This proved something to me that I believe to this
day and that permeates our new book, namely, that when teachers change
what they actually do in the classroom, change in students follows.