Leading In-Class Group Work

OneHE is a UK organization that produces professional learning resources for higher education faculty interested in developing their teaching skills. They've worked with a large number of experts (including past Intentional Teaching podcast guests James Lang, Michelle Miller, Kelly Hogan, Viji Sathy, and Thomas Tobin) to create short courses on a wide variety of topics. Most courses consist of about 20 minutes of videos and several reflection questions to help learners apply ideas from the videos to their own teaching practice.

I've worked with OneHE to produce three short courses: "Classroom Practice: Active Learning," "Small Teaching: Self Explaining" (with James Lang), and our newest course "Leading In-Class Group Work." Those first two require a OneHe membership, which is 14 USD per month with a 10-day free trial, but the new one on group work is completely free. You don't even need an account on the OneHE website to access it!

I think this latest course is our best yet. One reason is that I finally figured out how to record videos in my home office where I'm looking directly at the camera. But the main reason is that the course includes recaps of interesting research on small group work and useful suggestions for teaching practices that leverage in-class groups, like card sorting activities and jigsaw activities. And I really like the graphics that OneHE created to explain these activities in the videos!

Check out "Leading In-Class Group Work" when you have a little time, and while you're there, see what other OneHE courses might be of interest to you.

Student Performance Feedback with Jeff Przybylo and Thomas Fisher

With the advent of easy-to-use generative AI like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, many instructors have been looking into alternatives to traditional written essays, which are often easy to write with AI assistance. Last fall, I led a webinar on authentic assignments for GoReact, an educational technology company that provides video feedback tool that can be really useful for certain authentic assignments, particularly ones that are performance-based. I asked GoReact if they could connect me with faculty who they knew to be using their platform intentionally, and they were happy to oblige.

On this week's episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast, I talk with Jeff Przybylo, chair of communications arts and head coach of the speech and debate team at Harper College in Illinois, and Thomas Fisher, clinical associate professor of education and university supervisor for student teachers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Both of these faculty have incorporated GoReact into their teaching in really thoughtful ways, and I think you’ll get some ideas for using more video in your teaching, whether or not you teach in a performance field like Jeff and Tom.

For instance, both Jeff and Tom have their students record what Jeff calls "GoReactions." These are short, informal videos students record in place of a response paper they might have written about a reading or other learning material. Not only does this mitigate the use of generative AI, it also allows these faculty to provide feedback to their students that's tied to timecodes in the videos. Anchoring feedback in the students' videos this way is a form of annotation, and both Jeff and Tom find that students attend to this kind of feedback more closely than written, summative feedback provided at the end of a student submission.

​You can listen to my conversation with Jeff Bryzbylo and Thomas Fisher here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Backchannel in the History Classroom

Thanks to a post on LinkedIn, I read a very interesting article from Julia Gossard, associate dean for research and associate professor of history at Utah State University. The piece is called "Slack as a Backchannel in the Digital Classroom," and it details Gossard's use of a backchannel in her online honors course on the French and American revolutions and her in-person historical research methods course.

Gossard moved her revolutions course to a synchronous online format in the fall of 2020. She planned to run two immersive role-playing games from Reacting to the Past that fall, one on the American revolution and one on the French revolution. "Repeated and consistent student participation," Gossard writes, "especially through oral debate and communication, is a vital part of the course." Partially inspired by my blog post, "Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms," Gossard used Slack to create a backchannel for student participation in her course.

Slack was a great match for her learning objectives in this course. She created channels for each class session, where students could participate in discussions in character during the Reacting games. Student teams could also create private channels "to communicate directly and discretely with their teammates when we role play." See Gossard's article for more details on her backchannel approach, which worked great in the honors course but needed a little more structure in her methods course.

And if this idea of using Slack to help run a Reacting to the Past game interests you, listen to my conversation with Vanderbilt University's Holly Tucker from the Leading Lines podcast. Holly did something very similar when her courses moved online in 2020.

Thanks for reading!

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