Games in the Classroom (workshop)

 

The classroom affords multiple opportunities for the use of games: they can break ice, relieve communication apprehension, relieve boredom, and offer students a chance to creatively engage material. In the case of the latter, games also offer the instructor an opportunity to evaluate how much the students are learning.

 

When choosing or designing a game, it is of paramount importance to have clear goals. The instructor’s goals for the game will determine the nature and material of the game. The goals mirror the multiple opportunities above. The two main concerns of game design: 1) Is the game skill based? 2) Is the game content based? naturally follow the determined goals of the game. Both types of games can be used for relieving tension. However, when considering skill-vs-content games, the central concern is whether the instructor is interested in material application (skill) or material retention (content).

 

I believe in the benefits active learning, so I look forward to using games in review sessions and public speaking courses. Since the public speaking course was recently revised to focus more on content, this affords me a great opportunity to use games to make sure students are learning the material. Furthermore, the competition games naturally engender can carry over outside of the classroom. Dispassionate or apathetic students may get hooked by games and be more willing to engage the material outside of class. Although I advocate teamwork and cooperative learning environments, what is a better indicator of motivation and love for something than honest competition?

 

Finally, something I will remember about designing games is what is true of all interactive classroom activities: they often take the most planning on the part of the instructor and cannot be pieced together at the last minute.

CLASS OBSERVATION REFLECTION

 

I observed an introductory public speaking class at the end of October 2006. The class is taught by one of the second-year communication graduate teaching assistants. I’ll call her Anne. Anne spent the few minutes before class time speaking with the students and socializing. Since it was a Monday, the conversation naturally revolved around weekend activities. I immediately sensed that students were very comfortable engaging her in conversation.

 

Class began on time. Anne clearly indicated the beginning of class with a change of tone and, “Let’s get started,” however, the chatter continued a bit. She reinforced her statement with “I know you’re tired, but let’s focus.” This is an excellent method of engaging the students, because the instructor showed sympathy (“I know…” and verbal immediacy “Let’s…”). The class immediately settled. A less effective method (certainly less personable) would be to say, “Although you’re tired, it’s time for you to focus.” This is a direct challenge to the students’ faces and shows no verbal immediacy.

 

Anne began class by explaining the tasks for the day and briefly suggests how today’s topic connects with and applies to previously discussed material. Anne introduces the story she is about to tell by joking with the students that it’s time to practice their “active listening skills.” The fictional story is well told and illustrates the subject for this class and part of the next: considering the audience. After introducing the topic with her story, Anne moves to notes projected on the overhead to bullet the main points of her topic. Although she has the notes printed on a single sheet of paper, she keeps future points of the outline obscured until she covers them in class. This is useful for several reasons: 1) students are required to focus on what is being said now, not what will be said later; 2) students are not overwhelmed with too much information at once; and 3) students who only take notes in class but don’t listen may listen a little bit more (or at least not fall asleep) if they have to write down a bullet every few minutes.

 

Anne frequently uses verbally immediate language such as “we,” “our,” and “you” and often highlights her points with examples. Notably, she: refers to specific students’ speeches from other weeks (increased immediacy/teacher affect); uses examples from her own life (increased immediacy); and refers to seminars she attends, participates, or leads. This last point not only increase her perceived authority/credibility but also makes the material relevant to the students, since they can imagine how skills learned in the class are practically applied in the working world.

 

The class was paced very well. Anne regularly (but not overtly) checked time to pace herself. She speaks clearly and allows time for information to sink in before moving on to another topic. She is not afraid to pause and does not use fillers. She made good use of time by speaking while distributing a handout that illustrated one of her points. (Kudos for the useful handout!)

 

The final five minutes of class were spent in group-activity time. The students divided into five groups and were asked to answer a series of questions. Since time was running a little short, Anne told the class to do group-work today and present the topics for discussion on Wednesday. The five questions described different types of speech situations and allowed students the opportunity to consider the practical application of audience analysis. Anne handled the group work very well: she walked over to each group to check on progress; discussed their thought process; and explained any unclear points. She noticed one group was not taking the activity too seriously (“visit-time”) and walked over to casually ask them what they’ve come up with (nice!).

 

Overall, Anne did a superb job with this class. About halfway through the class, I realized that I hadn’t written anything negative, which is great. Naturally, I started keeping an extra-close eye out for anything I could pick up, because who would believe that I observed the perfect class? The only critique I have is that Anne never paused to ask if the students had any questions. She never outright said, “What are your questions?” Of course, I’ve only observed one of her classes and I imagine this could be part of the classroom dynamics. Her students seemed very comfortable engaging her and participating during class, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they were also comfortable to ask her questions without a prompt. She gave pause at appropriate times throughout class (e.g., transitions) and these were times when students could ask questions. So, I don’t really think this is much of a criticism because my best teachers never paused to ask questions either: I felt comfortable interrupting to ask a question. In summation, I think Anne is a very effective teacher.

 

I would like to reflect on affect. Affect is a positive attitude towards the class, material, or professor. In my TA training class, we’ve discussed how affect for the professor can change our attitude towards the subject matter. In my first year of undergrad, I was seriously considering psychology as my major. What little I knew about psychology, I found fascinating. Plus, I’d always had a keen sense for observing other people’s behaviors and an ability to parse their motives. I walked into my introductory psych class that first day. The professor was not in the class to greet us and came not late but after most of the students had entered the class. I know the beginning of the semester is especially hectic, but I can’t recall having many (if any) professors that weren’t present early enough to greet the class as they enter. This, however, is a little tangential, because I’m sure my retroactive analysis is putting more emphasis on this fact than it deserves.

 

The professor quickly introduced himself and took a monotone roll call. He then distributed a quiz (not to be graded) and gave us perhaps 10 minutes to take the quiz. The true/false quiz essentially described different behaviors and motivations or illustrated situations, where we had to guess how people would act. After we were done with the quiz, the professor covered the answers and asked people how they did (“Raise your hand if got 10 right, 20 right,” etc.) Nobody in the class did very well. The point of this exercise, as he explicitly noted, was to show us that A) psychology is not based in common sense at all and is often counter-intuitive and B) we students in the intro class know very little about psychology. He then explained his goals for the class (for us to learn the rudiments of the history and theory of psychology) and promptly began the first lecture.

 

I don’t have a huge problem with “A” above. I wouldn’t do it. I question the pedagogical benefits of violating student expectations in the first 30 min. of meeting them, but I can see how some students might take this as a “challenge”. “B” is what really bothered me then and, frankly, makes me even more upset now that I have some vocabulary, knowledge, and research with which to critique this professor’s behavior. To explicitly tell students in an introductory course how little they know is counter-productive and condescending. Not to mention that it doesn’t do much for a student’s esteem or affect for the course. That first day in introductory psychology is the day that I lost all affect for the subject and shut off my brain (to psychology). I’m sure it wasn’t the mature way to deal with the situation, but this is an example of how a teacher’s attitude can really affect student behavior. Furthermore, the teacher never behaved in a way to counter the opinion I made on that first day of class. I’ll always remember this professor as an example of how not to act with one’s students.

 

As a final note, I’d like to add that, as a social scientist/theorist, I’ve re-found my love for things psychological.

 

Chris and I jointly conducted a review session for the COM240 class. We adopted some of Cynthia’s slides to guide the progression, used the whiteboard to chart out different components of theories and variables, and presented a PowerPoint presentation with different hypotheses, to give the students a chance to practice troublesome points and apply the things we just reviewed. The students emailed me in advance if they were planning on attending the review session. We were sure some would just show up, but even so there were more students than we’d expected. I’d guess about a third to a half of the class showed up. (This is easily three-quarters of the students that regularly attend class).  That’s a long way of saying the classroom we were in was very “cozy.”

 

The students were very responsive in this environment and were ready to take an active role to better prepare themselves for the exam. They might have felt more at ease, too, because I forgot to turn the screensaver off on my laptop (from which we would later present) so my screensaver came on, which is a slideshow of my trip to the UT game this year. Some of the pictures they saw were amusing, not in an unprofessional way, but the pictures are casual, so in a way it was a form of self disclosure; the students certainly got a big kick out of it.

 

We covered the creation of a hypothesis from the bottom-up, so we began by discussing variables and attributes. Chris did much of the explaining and defining of the terminology from the notes, and I provided examples to illustrate difficult concepts, such as continuous and discrete variables, hypotheses of relationship vs. difference, etc. We managed to get a lot of feedback from the students on what they knew and didn’t know, so we were able to repeatedly (and differently) explain the same concepts until the students felt comfortable. After about 90 minutes, we were mostly done with explaining hypothesis-formation, so we moved on to providing the students with examples of hypotheses. We brought some Halloween candy to share with the students at this point.

 

This was the point at which I’d say we “lost” the students. They chowed down the candy, got their sugar rush on, and I’m glad we were done explaining hypothesis-formation by this point because I don’t think they would’ve absorbed much. After a few examples, about half the students left. The other half stuck around for a little while longer. After going through a few of the examples, we realized the examples weren’t quite as fleshed-out as would have been helpful for answering some of the questions (i.e., whether the variable was discrete or continuous). We went with the flow and ad-libbed some information or guided student discussion to still make use of the examples.

 

As I reflect on this review session, I think we tried to cram in far too much information. Covering hypothesis formation and all of the associated components in 90 minutes is like running the 800. We’d asked the students to provide us with specific questions they had or topics they wanted to cover in the review session but all the responses were variations on “everything since the last exam.” Although reviewing all of that information was helpful to some, I think it may have been more beneficial to hit only the “big points” and spend more time practicing with hypotheses, then address issues as they arise during application. Even given this self-criticism, the students felt that the review session was helpful and worthwhile, so I still feel good about organizing a useful review session. Next time, though, I’ll definitely keep in mind some of these lessons. I’ve also since found some useful online tools that will help me create word searches, crosswords, etc. that I might provide for students to complete before coming to a review session. I think a “review” activity before the session per se will highlight for students which concepts exactly they’re having trouble with.

 

This workshop, sponsored by the Campus Writing and Speaking Program, is particularly salient as we begin considering the intended and unintended consequences of distance education (DE). DE can be an extremely powerful tool and can come in unexpected forms. For example, I brought up the case of “Second Life,” an online environment where people can meet and chat through the use of avatars. This completely customizable online world has been successfully co-opted recently by trainers to allow people in high-risk jobs to engage in low-risk training situations. For example, firefighters can practice how to evacuate a building, or cabin crews can practice coordinating a plane evacuation. Although these are simulations, they give participants the unique opportunity to practice their coordination: a critical asset in these situations.

 

There are also a plenitude of misconceptions students have about more traditional DE courses. Many students seem to expect DE courses to reflect lecture courses, or the “hypodermic model” of communication, where the professor is actively engaged and students are sponges. Realistically speaking, this is not the case. DE often requires more student participation than traditional education because of the online environment DE takes place in. Students need to be much more autonomous with DE and can expect to be heavily involved in group discussion if not group work. One of the challenges of DE is making sure that students have realistic expectations of the course environment. Of course, this can be said of any course and this point should therefore be highlighted in the syllabus.

    

The discussion was particularly useful for me, because I am interested in creating “hybrid” courses for students that take advantage of both online and offline interaction. In the future, I believe the number of courses that are strictly classroom based will be in the minority. I need to challenge my expectations of classes as an instructor and tailor classes to a hybrid environment. One thing a hybrid or DE course is NOT is simply a classroom class “cut and paste” onto a web page. Another important point to keep in mind is that DE and hybrid courses are not synonymous with “distance.” Over 50% of NCSU DE students actually live on campus. This fact reflects the changing nature (modularization? commodification?) of education. These are challenges we must not shy away from; rather we need to creatively engage the opportunities offered by DE, such as increased student-student online interaction and collaboration.