University Times

A professor enters the classroom several minutes before the start of class. Some students are there already, milling about, talking or doing the daily crossword puzzle — their minds on anything but the course material.

As the professor begins the class, students take a while to settle down and discontinue socializing. Other students saunter in a little late.

Precious minutes of class time are irretrievably lost.

This is a common problem for teachers, isn’t it? asked Robert S. Parker, assistant professor and CNG faculty fellow in Pitt’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering.

“One of my objectives, from a teaching perspective, is to get my students engaged in the class from minute one,” said Parker. “So the fundamental question in this discussion is how to get the student engaged, both in a discussion format, where students are willing to offer their thoughts and opinions, and also in a format where the brain is engaged at the beginning of class. That way, students are ready for what’s coming and they have the ability to look backwards at previous classes and tie various data together.”

A related common problem is that students are reluctant to participate of their own accord, Parker said. “Sometimes I feel a lot like the dentist: ‘Okay, I want you to participate. Now, I’m going to place this set of pliers in your mouth and pull a tooth out.’”

Students don’t respond well to being put on the spot, unless they have a “safety net” to fall back on, such as the support of a small group of fellow students, Parker said.

What’s the solution?

Parker offered a few pointers. “The first is to set up a pattern, from an early point in the course, for what your class will look like, that is, to start with something similar every day,” he said.

Pointer No. 2: Make it clear to the students that they will be held accountable both as individuals and as members assigned at the beginning of the term to a group of five classmates. “You want individual accountability because, at the end of the day, each student is going to have to take the knowledge and apply it,” Parker pointed out. “But the true definition of whether you understand something is whether you can explain it to someone else. I believe learning is collaborative. If you’re going to learn something, you need to get with someone else and talk it through.”

The third pointer is that the teacher should incorporate some excitement, some tension, perhaps even some fun in the classroom.

Putting these guidelines all together, Parker (an avid sports fan) developed a teaching mechanism he has dubbed “the two-minute drill.”

At the beginning of the term, students are asked to provide basic information on an index card: the student’s name, birthday, hometown and e-mail address if it differs from the student’s University account address.

Parker uses the cards to call on students more or less randomly at the beginning of each class. “I take information covered in the past class and put together four or five thought-provoking questions. The challenge is I only make the questions available, via e-mail, for about two hours before the class,” Parker explained. “So the students have two options: They can be confident in their skills, show up in class and — heaven forbid -— I draw their ‘dreaded’ index card and ask them a question, or they can take the questions that are posted and prepare themselves for the class,” he said.

“I don’t mind either way. If they’re doing the preparation, that means they’re going back and looking at the material, and if they’re confident to do it on the fly, more power to them,” Parker said.

Parker draws the cards, putting a checkmark to keep track of how many times a particular student has answered a question reasonably well over the course of the term. This serves as one indicator of class participation, which counts toward the final grade.

“I draw a card and read the name. That person has the option to pick one of the questions and he or she also has the opportunity to say, ‘I don’t know the answer, but give me a minute,’” Parker said.

Students then have 60 seconds to use their safety net, discuss the question with their group and offer a consensus answer to the rest of the class.

“In the course of the first three to five minutes of class we have individual accountability for students who will take the question and have to answer it, as well as some group accountability for answering questions,” said Parker.

The technique also allows the students to get to know each other and to work together in an educational — as opposed to a social — framework, he added.

“What normally will happen is that I will re-word the answer for technical purposes, to make sure the nomenclature is right and that the various caveats or assumptions have been covered,” he said. “But in this way the students have the opportunity to get involved right away with the brain engaged so they can see where we’re headed in the current class.”

Parker occasionally varies the routine, forcing a student to answer a particular question rather than choose any one of them to answer, for example, or specifying that the student’s group must answer the question, rather than the individual.

“I’ll have Yahoo day — everybody in class who uses a Yahoo e-mail address will be subject to being called on,” he said. “It’s not meant to be competitive. In posing the questions, I try to be fairly conversational at the start, to get people cycled up to speed: ‘Okay, what do you think? Give me an example of a problem.’ I even allow a responsible back-and-forth discussion.”

When students’ answers are at odds, Parker utilizes “vote with Bob,” where he polls students for their answers on particularly challenging questions.

“The point is I try to make this fun for the students,” he said.

Is it fun for the instructor as well?

“It does require more work to formulate the questions, at least the first time you try this mechanism. But I’ve found I can re-use the questions from year to year,” Parker said.

The rest of the class session is ordinary, he added, except that he tries to avoid being the central focus of the whole class time.

“After the two-minute drill, I’ll lecture for 10 or 15 minutes,” Parker said. “But I always try to put in a given class one or two opportunities to do what I call exercises. In my courses, these are computational, but it would obviously depend on the course content or discipline. It at least gets them doing something active, of collaborating, instead of just sitting and listening to me.”

—Peter Hart