I recently read the book Teaching with the Brain in Mind, by Eric Jensen, and it highlighted something that I need to do more deliberately in my classroom. In his explanation of the need for repetition in order to strengthen connections in the brain, he discusses the use of pre-exposure, previewing, priming, reviewing, and revision. Though I regularly do all of these when teaching, I am rather informal with the three that happen immediately preceding, alongside, or directly after the learning in the classroom; previewing, priming, and reviewing.

Pre-exposure usually occurs days or weeks ahead of the actual learning. I introduce topics using collaborative Google docs, and more recently a Facebook group. Both of these platforms introduce material to students ahead of time allowing them to explore and discuss concepts and strategies before we dig in in the classroom. These are great formative assessment tools as the allow me to observe their discovery virtually, and it helps me to better structure my lessons. I am also able to jump in when there are misconceptions or the occasional exasperated student :-).

Yesterday, my students were having an engaging discussion about how to process data for their enzyme design labs. It was clear that repetition was going to be necessary, but as always, time is a factor. I decided to be more deliberate about using previewing, priming and reviewing during my lesson today. Enter TodaysMeet.

TodaysMeet is essentially Twitter without all of the distractions. It is perfect for the classroom, because it allows students to ask questions, discuss what is being presented, and reflect on their learning alongside live presentations.

TodaysMeet is simple to set up. If you click on the image below, it will take you to the site. No sign-up or e-mail address is required.

All you do is: (1) Name your room. (2) Select the duration that you want the room data to be saved (this can be anywhere from 2 hours to 1 year). (3) Create class.

That will take you to the chat space. Here you just enter your name and select join.

Now you are ready to post! Anyone with the link can join the chat.

Previewing is supposed to take place minutes or hours ahead of the learning. I used TodaysMeet as a tool to get kids to check-in and review the material that we were going to discuss in class. At the beginning of class I had them look over their lab draft, and post any key observations, questions, or difficulties that they had with the lab the previous night. This not only forced them to focus on the material, but it also gave me the information that I needed for some “just-in-time teaching”.

I then asked for volunteers to project their lab and Excel spreadsheets so that we could reflect, question and provide feedback as a class. While the student volunteer explained their decisions, strategies and methods for processing, the student in class were instructed to use TodaysMeet to record their questions and observations without interrupting the student presenter. It is important to establish protocols for commenting so that the students are respectful to the presenters as you can’t edit comments.

After the presenter finished, I discussed each aspect one section at a time and made suggestions. At the end of each section, I had the students review their own work and reflect using TodaysMeet.

At the end of class I had the students post any remaining questions. I then read through the TodaysMeet transcript which is hyperlinked below the chat box and collated any remaining questions on a collaborative Google doc that was shared with the class. This will encourage students to continue their discussion allowing for the necessary revision to take place before the final draft is due in the next class.

As my first class was leaving, I overheard a student telling a few students from the next period that class was great today…really helpful. So a big thumbs up for TodaysMeet.

Last night, I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture at our school given by Howard Gardner. For those of you who don’t know who he is, you can read up on his contributions to cognition and education at this link. In his lecture he discussed his book, Five Minds for the Future. Two of the “minds” resonated with a struggle that I have been having with my 10th grade biology students: the disciplined mind and the synthesizing mind. We are currently studying digestion. As an introduction to mechanical and chemical digestion, we followed a meal through the system in an organ sequence. As with most topics in biology, there is a large amount of vocabulary involved. After doing several activities, I quizzed the students over their knowledge of the enzymes, substrates and processes involved in digestion and discovered a contradiction in their learning. The good news was that the majority of my students had managed to memorize the information. The bad news was that they memorized the information as a series of discrete, disconnected facts that followed the sequence of organs in digestion and could not apply them to the bigger concepts in biology.

What my students lacked was the ability to synthesize the large volume of information they had learned and apply it to different contexts. So today in class, wrote a jumble of 26 words on the white board including two words that we had not discussed.

I then divided them into mixed-ability, collaborative groups and instructed them to create a concept map that would connect all of the words on the board in a way that accurately showed the relationships between the words. The only rules I gave them were that they could not repeat words in their map, they could not use organs or organ sequence as an organizational strategy, and anything they didn’t know they had to discover on their own using internet resources. For added incentive, there was a prize for the first group that could convince me of their organization of terms.

Though they struggled quite a bit at first, I was impressed by the engagement of the students at all levels and the learning that went on throughout the process. The hardest part for the students was to think of the concepts as disconnected from the organ sequence. Once they started to regroup the terms using different organizational rules, they began to visualize them in a different context and were able to grasp the larger applications of enzyme digestion. What surprised me the most was the fact that the groups came up with logical arrangements that I had not predicted. By the end of the activity even the weaker students experienced “aha” moments.

In Gardner’s book, Five Minds for the Future, he quotes a navy captain:

“You feel it creeping up into your brain like a numbing cold and you just have to choke it all down, sift faster, and stay with it. [It’s] challenging to be sure, but if you practise it, you develop a good tool…”

…or perhaps a synthesizing mind.

TodaysMeet: Using Backchanneling During Class to Maximize Repetition

Howard Gardner, the Synthesizing Mind, and Biology