Day 2: The Excrement Hits the Air Circulation Appliance

I don't have a lecture for today.

Lemme repeat that: I don't have a lecture ready for my class in less than 3 hours. And I ain't makin' one.

My personal goal for this term is to not lecture more than 10 minutes in a class. 

So today is the Real First Day of active learning pedagogy. First, they will take a 3-question quiz at the start. Each person gets a quiz form with 8 versions of the quiz questions lettered A-H. There are 16 D-shaped tables with 8 chairs in this room. So I'm putting up a generic table map giving each seat position a number. Each seat number will have specific quiz questions to answer:

After I shot all my copies I realized that it would be easier if I had lettered each seat in order to match the quiz questions. I'm a #@^&!ing genius. 

Of course I'll explain that no two people at a table should be answering the same question. Here's the quiz, by the way (link). Not the beefiest thing in the universe, but the point is to drive them to do the readings. They also have to tell me the length of their pace in feet.

After the quiz, we start a participatory mapping activity. They have to figure out where on campus they start and end their day (a typical Tuesday), and where they go on campus. Then I send them off to pace it out, add up their walking and convert it to miles.

The purpose of this activity is to get them thinking about maps, and interacting with maps. Kind of funny that we built them a million dollar classroom and today they're going to spend most of their time outside. It's nice out right now though.

I would like to assign each table a number, but I have pretty much zero confidence in my ability to remember where I decided they would be. What a slacker I am!

Reflections on Day 1

This is the first thing on my syllabus:

SYLLABUS: Physical Geography GEO 105

TR 1530-1720 (3:30-5:20) DOW 135 Course Reference # 22258467

What on Earth is going on here?

You are sitting in the finest classroom in the state of Michigan, if not the entire nation. This is an “Active Learning” classroom, and this is an “Active Learning” class. Both are designed based on research proven to improve student learning—YOUR learning. That’s not all: an active learning class is way more fun to take and to teach. That’s also proven by research, but you don’t need research to know when you’re in a class that feels worth your time and money.

An active learning class shifts around the work. It may feel like more work compared to other classes, or it may feel like less because the when and why of it makes more sense. It’s NOT MORE work than getting an ‘A’ in a regular class, but it is definitely different. It’s way more work than getting a ‘C’ though.

I will not ask you to listen to me talk for 16 weeks and then vomit back everything I ever said on a test. I will not show you 7000 Powerpoint slides filled with words for you to write down and vomit back on a test. Instead, I will ask you to read and watch and do things outside of class. We will use class time for activities and for using the things you did outside of class. I really, really need for you to do these outside-of-class things. This is an expectation that I have of you. You need to be willing to trade that for taking a class that is not 16 horrible weeks of an old guy talking at you while looking at a screen. You’ll take some tests, but you’ll feel and be ready for them, because you USED the material instead of just copying notes. 

I was going for an ethos of accountability to match the frankly gorgeous room this is taking place in. I didn't read the syllabus to them. Instead, I gave them a self-guided activity that consisted of three parts (link to document). Part 1 was the typical icebreaker stuff; Part 2 was a syllabus scavenger hunt with some hypothetical situations where students had to come up with "what would Feig do" answers. Part 3 was some basic geography stuff, like lat/long, prime meridian, equator, and converting between English and metric. Normally I would lecture that. Today, they taught each other. While they did that I went around the room shaking hands and meeting students. I shook 104 hands!

I did have one tech flub though: Between this class and the one prior, I managed to damage the micro-HDMI socket on my Android tablet. So I had 104 people watching the moronic prof who couldn't figure out what was wrong. Sheesh. Well, as my wife says, you gotta have one mistake to let the evil spirits out of your endeavor. Okay, then. That ought to have done it.

It was really great to be focused on people instead of a PPT slide or a screen. 

And to set them on the active learning track, I gave them 13 pages to read from the text, and a video that I made on how using your pace to measure distance. (link to video). They need to view that and be able to say what their pace is (and answer some questions from the readings) on the quiz first thing. 

I think they're taking this seriously: So far that video has about 98 views since Tuesday. If each of those is a unique student user, then that's pretty good. 

I threw a bonus in there too: any student who wants to upload his/her own video on calculating their pace could contact me and do it for bonus points. I got 3 of those takers so far!

Tee Minus 35 and Counting...

Greetings! This blog is aimed to all who want to read about the development of an active learning, or "flipped"--classroom in an introductory Physical Geography class.

I'm going live with 104 students in just under 35 minutes. 

I have spent all summer prepping for this class. Know what I learned? No matter how many videos you make (I made 16), no matter how many activities you redesign, no matter how much you pore over your calendar, you CANNOT get an active learning class ready by Day 1.

Well, I can't.

There's so much to do! It was a blast rethinking this course. And it came just in time, too. I was recently tenured, and as we know, not reforming your teaching and just lecturing is a safe road to tenure (Feig, 2013--gratuitous self-citation! In a blog! Yay!) Now I'm ready to cause trouble.

The active learning classrooms CMU designed are freakin' amazing. They work beautifully, they are a joy to look at, and the student space is big with the teacher space being small. Beauty.

Later on I'll post excerpts from my syllabus, some of the videos I made, and reflections from Day 1. Since this is a TR afternoon class, it has about half upperclassmen, even though it's a 100-level.

Off we go!

-af