PROFESSOR: One of the things that's
different about a recitation like this
is that you're really coaching students as opposed
to talking at them.
So it takes a little bit of a different mindset.
In a normal recitation, you prepare 50 minutes of material.
And you would go in, and you'd be prepared
to lecture for 50 minutes.
In a recitation like this, you have to be much more flexible.
You have to think about, how far do I let the students go?
Do I need to go intervene or let them work it out a little bit?
Sometimes it's important for students
to really struggle a little bit to see
what the central issue is, but letting them struggle too long
is not productive.
So it's very useful, at that point,
to step in and try to help.
I like to think of it as coaching rather than telling.
If you were teaching students or athletes
how to play soccer or baseball, you wouldn't just
tell them about it.
You would go out and show them.
You would watch how they do it.
You would correct big mistakes.
As that got better, you'd correct small mistakes.
And that's really the way to think
about a recitation like this, that you're coaching them,
you're helping shape the students' understanding
so that they can become, hopefully, as expert
as you are in the material.
So most of us are used to knowing
what's going to happen in the 50 minutes in the classroom.
So you prepare a certain amount of material.
You expect to go in and present that material.
You might run a little short or a little long,
but there aren't any big surprises.
When you run an active recitation like this, well,
what I typically do is I prepare more problems
than I think I'll need, because I don't know
how many I will actually use.
And sometimes I use three or four,
and sometimes we may only use one.
And so one of the things you have to be prepared for
is to adapt on the fly.
You've got to be willing to be flexible and work a little bit
without a net, because you're just not quite sure what's
going to happen.
And I've seen this in classroom instruction using
active techniques as well, where I've asked a concept question
and discovered, through this immediate feedback,
that students have no idea what I'm talking about.
Well, it would just be foolish at that point
to plow ahead and keep talking about this thing they
don't know about.
You really have to adapt and figure out,
what have I done wrong?
How can I make this concept clearer,
because I haven't really done a good job.
This certainly is a lead compensator,
but I almost always write it in-- a really good problem
in recitation is one that's not tricky
but that is likely to expose a misconception that students
commonly have.
So if you've taught a class for a while,
you may discover that students often
make the same kind of error when looking at a problem.
And if that's the case, then a very good thing to do
is to present a problem where they have the opportunity
to make that mistake.
You don't want them to make the mistake,
but if they do make that mistake,
it's then an opportunity for teaching, right?
It's a teaching moment where you can
explain why that might seem like the right answer,
and why it's, in fact, not, and correct that misconception.
One of the things I really like about this approach
is that it's just fun.
It's much more fun to spend 50 minutes
coaching students, talking with them, chatting with them,
getting to know them a little bit,
understanding what they don't understand than it is to just
talk at them for 50 minutes.
So all other things being equal, I'd
much prefer to do the stand up recitation
than a conventional recitation.
Of course, what really matters is the outcome,
but I do think the outcomes are better.
So in this case, it's a win-win situation.
I really enjoy it, and I actually
wouldn't do it any other way in the future.