Introduction

I was introduced to the instructional strategy of interteaching by Rob McEntarffer:

Follow-up tweets[1] put me in touch with Raechel Soicher, a PhD student at Oregon state who’s used interteaching with her psychology classes. She was kind enough to share with us a few assignments she’s given to students, her own poster presentation on the topic, and some journal articles to read-up on the instructional strategy. With all of that, we decided to use the instructional practice once each semester; the first would be with the Research Methods chapter.

There are four steps to interteaching.

Step 1

In our first step, students read a chapter on Research Methods. We gave them the PDF and the due date (Aug 29) as part of their “summer reading” assignment.

Step 2

In our second step, students were given the homework assignment of responding to eight questions, by hand, in their composition book[2]. We asked them to rewrite the question before responding to it, and to set a time limit on themselves of 20-minutes.

Two subpoints here. First, we only checked these for completion; they were not corrected by us at all. Second, I was a little struck by how little students wrote for their responses. I assume this was because they had the 20-minute time limit and they are unaccustomed to writing by hand.

Step 3

In our third step, students were automatically assigned to triads and were given the remainder of the hour-long class period to talk through each of the questions, come to a consensus, and one of them record the group’s response. Before setting them loose, however, we thought it’d be instructive to teach them about interteaching. We really wanted to emphasize the importance of good, rich dialogue between themselves on each question. Linked here are our slides for this day.

Five subpoints here. First, most of the research indicates partnerships for this step, but we have three sections of Cognitive Psychology and a lot of students… and, frankly, we wanted to minimize our correcting. Second, we had students type these responses, unlike their individual responses in step 2 because (a) we wanted them to be able to get more done in less time, (b) correcting typed work is far easier than correcting handwritten submissions, and © we toyed with the idea of running their submissions through turnitin.com, which necessitates typed work. Third, we discussed prohibiting computing devices (other than the group secretary) because we were afraid of students simply Googling answers. But we decided against banning tech because we wanted them to engage in just-in-time learning; we wanted them to look up whatever they didn’t know, and hopefully learn it in the process.[3] Fourth, students who had not turned in their individual work in step 3 were invited to the hallway outside of the class to catch up on reading the assigned chapter and answering the questions on their own. I had three such students in one period, and I gently told them that “we don’t allow freeloaders in this step. You didn’t do the preparation and so you cannot meaningfully contribute to the group. Just stay out here and catch up on your work.” Fifth, for one section, I had a countdown timer projected on the screen, and for one section I did not. With the first, I thought the countdown would help students stay on-task, and it did — the fastest group finished with 15-minutes left in the period. In the section without the countdown timer, the fastest group finished with 10-minutes left in the class. In both cases, the last group finished with 5-minutes remaining.

Step 4

The fourth step is a brief lecture covering only the most important topics that students either had the most questions about or demonstrated less than full understanding[4] of on the prior step. At the time of this writing, this linked lecture is continuing to evolve.

Conclusion

The short answer to the obvious question of “How’d it go?” is that we decided to use the interteaching instructional strategy more than just twice during the semester; we’re planning on using it twice per Quarter. The next topic for which we’ll use it is Cognitive Development (ie, Piaget, Erickson, Kohlberg, etc.)

Citations

Saville, B. K., Zinn, T. E., Neef, N. A., Van Norman, R., & Ferreri, S. J. (2006). A Comparison of Interteaching and Lecture in the College Classroom. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 39(1), 49–61. http://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2006.42–05

Boyce, T. E., & Hineline, P. N. (2002). Interteaching: A strategy for enhancing the user-friendliness of behavioral arrangements in the college classroom. Behavior Analyst, 25(2), 215–226. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392059

Saville, B. K., Zinn, T. E., & Elliott, M. P. (2005). Interteaching versus Traditional Methods of Instruction: A Preliminary Analysis. Teaching of Psychology, 32(3), 161–163. http://doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top3203_6

Perusing the tweets about interteaching can be instructive.  ↩

Our primary reason for asking them to respond by hand is that we did not want students sharing responses with each other. We wanted each student to do their own work, and not copy & paste someone else’s answers. (Of course, handwriting is no guarantee than copying did not take place, but it introduces a little more friction over typed responses.)  ↩

We made up all of the questions on our own, and so none were strictly Google-able, as they would have been if they’d originated from the textbook publisher.  ↩

Fortunately we happened to have the three day Labor Day weekend to grade the triad’s classwork. Carefully reading 600 responses without that would have been… challenging.  ↩