MAILING LISTS

Friends,

I ran across a cool way to do Simultaneous Report on application activities in a large class if you are not using colored cards or clickers or anything like that.

There is a chemistry teacher here who teaches 400+ students, and often gives them three options and tells them to choose A, B or C.  At the count of three, he has everyone point:  if you like A you point to the left wall, if you like B you point to the ceiling, if you like C folks you to the right wall.  

I like this idea, but from where I was sitting (as a "student") I could clearly see all the B's pointing up, but could not easily distinguish among A's and C's.  It looked like a sea of horizontal arms.

But it gave me an idea:

You have students raise their hands to indicate which among three choices they prefer, but instead of holding up hands sequentially, you have them all hold up their hands at once but with their hands in one of the three classic shapes of a childhood game we play in North America:

A)  "Rock" (closed fist)
B)  "Paper" (palm forward, fingers closed)
C)  "Scissors" (first two fingers up in a "v" shape.)

Clearly this would be for informal, ungraded "polling" type questions, but it does seem like it could prevent the "answer drift" of sequential hand-raising and *might* allow students to get a better overall sense of what other folks in the class thought.

Has anyone done this?  If not, do you think it might work?

-M




Michael Sweet, Ph.D.
Faculty Development Specialist
Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL)
University of Texas Austin
MAI 2206 * (512) 232-1775

"Teaching is the profession that makes all other professions possible." - Todd Witaker