Students in our Social-Cognitive Psychology course had their second experience with interteaching (see first reflection), this time around Cognitive Development. For those unfamiliar with the instructional method, it involves four steps: students read/ view material, then answer questions on the material for themselves; in class, they work with a small group to produce collective responses to the same questions, which they submit; and the first 10- to 20-minutes of the next class is a lecture addressing the most-missed items.
Because it had only been two weeks since the last instance of interteaching, students knew what to do and needed little coaching. Two things stood out to us instructors though.
First, two class sections had a significant number of students (~20%) who had not done the preparatory work (the reading and/or responding to the questions). Consequently, they were invited to catch-up with the rest of the class by moing into the hallway and using the class-hour to do the work they should have done at home. They do not lose points; they do not get scolded or yelled at; they do not get ‘detention’ or any punishment — but we suspect the embarassment they feel will increase their desire to do the preparatory work the next time.
Second, we each noticed one or two students in each class section not fully participating in the triad’s discussion of the questions. I had just read an article on Faculty Focus, “Students Riding on Coattails during Group Work? Five Simple Ideas to Try”, which addressed this issue (and I tweeted about our issue). It doesn’t look like any of the five suggested strategies will address the exact issue we saw in the class, and so we’ll be returning to the literature on interteaching to see what others have written about step 3.
All-in-all, the instructional practice again felt successful. As we walked around, monitoring and answering questions, the vast majority of students were on-task and actively engaged in their conversations. They asked some good clarifying questions of us, but by and large were self-sufficient using each other as resources as well as returning to the source material (the assigned chapter of a textbook) for just-in-time learning. Our plan is to use the interteaching method another two times this semester.