Having “taken” Dan Ariely’s “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior” MOOC, I’ve been thinking more about using experiments to test my suspicions about curriculum and instruction. Yesterday, I ran an experiment with my students, using the two class periods as separate groups.
The last assignment/ activity that we do in AP Psychology is called 2x4x6; it’s a two-minute presentation, during which students can use two 4x6 cards. In the presentation, they do two things: talk about one thing they love, and introduce the next speaker.
In describing the assignment, I demonstrate by giving a two-minute talk about one thing that I love. I used a different subject for each class period; that was my independent variable. What I’m most interested in is student engagement/ student buy-in for the activity; that’s my dependent variable. All other meaningful variables were the same (possible confounding variables include the different time of day for each class, and the “personality”[1] of the two classes).
For my first period class, I told them about my love of running; why a 39-year old man who will never actually win a race, still runs most days in the week, and runs in official races regularly; I told them about my dad dying of skin cancer, and my own brush with skin cancer as the catalyst for becoming a runner. For my second period class, I told them about my love of teaching; why a guy who doesn’t want kids of his own, and doesn’t like “kids,” chose to be a teacher — and loves it.
Frankly, the love-of-teaching story is quite a bit harder to tell. It’s more revealing of an interior life because it’s not something that I normally talk about, whereas students will often see me running before, during, or after school.
Based solely on student responses, talking about my love of teaching was clearly the way to go. When talking abouting running, no student teared up; when talking about my love of teaching, no student’s face was lit by the glow of their iPad; and when students left the room at the end of class, more students from the love-of-teaching class walked past me, toward the door, and said something[2].
For next year: dump the love of running story, and go with why I love teaching.
-
Every classroom teacher knows that every class has a different collective personality. Some classes are more serious than others; some are more inquisitive; some are more compliant; some are more studious; etc. ↩
-
I don’t know exactly how to classify this “something” that students in one class said/ did when leaving, but if you’re a teacher, you know what I mean: it showed in some way that a connection had been made; they were reaching out to me, personally, and trying to communicate something. ↩