Clickers and Peer Instruction

Peer instruction, a technique made popular in college lecture halls by Harvard physics professor, Eric Mazur, may be better known to elementary and high school teachers as the cooperative learning strategy, Think-Pair-Share.

Whatever you choose to call this strategy, it becomes even more effective when combined with the use of clickers. This technique can be used during whole class discussions and is an effective tool to get students to think on their own, to listen to differing opinions, and to generate their own opinion about a topic.

Peer instruction provides several learning benefits to students. It gives the student the opportunity to try and persuade his partner or group that his idea is correct. To do so, the students has to put his thoughts in order and verbalize his explanation. If the student has the correct idea, this helps the student to understand and retain the information.

When a student explains an incorrect answer, misconceptions or faulty thinking surrounding the answer are often aired when presented with questioning from the partner.

To Incorporate Clickers Into Peer Instruction or Think-Pair-Share:

• Students listen while you pose a thought-provoking question. Create a question that will stimulate deep thought and good discussion. If teaching a key concept, focus the question so that misconceptions will most certainly be brought to the light.

  Avoid launching into a lengthy explanation before posing the question. Don't read the question aloud. Just pose the question.

• Students THINK individually about their response for an allotted number of seconds or minutes. Make sure students don't comment to each other during this time. Require absolute silence in the classroom or lecture hall. Thinking time is important and sometimes hard for teachers to wait patiently on. Hold yourself back from rushing this time!
• After the allotted THINK time is over, have students submit their answer to the question on their CPS remote.
• Post graph of results for everyone to see. This is optional. Sometimes it is more effective to not post the graph of what students answered. Choose what works best for your question.
• Have students PAIR up or get into groups of 3 or 4 and share what answer they chose and why with their partner or group. This is more effective if students pair with someone who chose a different answer than them and try to convince their partner that their answer is correct.

  Let students know that they need to choose a partner who chose a different answer. Inform them that this might require getting up and moving around the room. Depending upon the age of your students, there will probably be a best way to facilitate this.

  This is the most important learning time during this process. Students now have the challenge of verbalizing their reasons for choosing the answer they did. This exposes them to questioning and sometimes opposing ideas from their partner.

  Walking among the groups while they are discussing will let you know what misconceptions are present and what explanations those with the correct answer are using to defend or explain their answer.

  You will very likely find that students can sometimes explain the correct answer better than the teacher. Very often, they have only just learned the information themselves, so they are still very much aware of the misconceptions that might be present and how they themselves addressed them.

• Have students answer the question on their CPS remote again after the discussion with classmates.
• Use the random student selector and have students SHARE their differing opinions and explain why they--if anyone did--may have changed their answer.

  
  Eric Mazur's ConcepTest Process

  

  
  Return from Clickers & Peer Instruction to Teaching With Clickers

  
  
  

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