Taking Clickers to the Next Level

From the Marshall Memo #448

In this VatorNews article, Faith Merino describes a mistake she made as a young creative-writing teacher in Brooklyn. She had finished a lesson on perspective and voice and asked her students, “Does anyone have any questions?” There was a long silence and then one boy raised his hand and asked, “Is it true Chinese people eat dogs?” Merino couldn’t contain herself: she burst out laughing. 

“Most teachers – new and established, alike – know that asking a room full of students if anyone has any questions is pointless,” she says ruefully, “…How do you make sure that every student in the room understands the material without alienating those who don’t and slowing down those that do?” 

Well, there are low-tech methods like having students write their answers on cards and 

scanning the room or giving a short quiz, but they lack immediacy. “In the time it takes you to grade a quiz or scan a room full of cards, the students’ brains are elsewhere,” says Merino. A much quicker method of getting feedback is student response systems, a.k.a. clickers. “The ‘clicker’ movement has taken off like a tornado as educators snap them up for their classrooms,” she says. Clickers allow a teacher to focus on understanding versus recall, on reasoning versus answers, says Ian Beatty of the University of North Carolina/Greensboro. “Once students have committed to and externalized an answer, even if only guessing, they are emotionally invested in the problem and pay far more attention to subsequent discussion and resolution.” 

Clickers aren’t free and they don’t always produce better learning, which has led teachers to explore the next generation of remote classroom response systems that allow students to use laptops, smartphones, and tablets to send in responses to teachers’ questions. One K-12 product created by Louise Waters and her team in the Leadership Public Schools in California is ExitTicket, which displays students’ answers – http://www.exitticket.org. See the following article for more detail on this idea.

“Resetting Education: Tapping Into the Classroom” by Faith Merino in VatorNews, Aug. 13, 2012, http://vator.tv/news/2012-08-13-resetting-education-tapping-into-the-classroom