These tips seek to provide on-the-ground, concrete advice and resources for those seeking to adoption a peer instruction pedagogy (aka clickers) in their computing classrooms. A treasure-trove of information on clicker/peer instruction use in higher education in the sciences to which I refer people constantly is the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative Clicker Resource Page. This page differs in that it assumes you are ready to implement peer instruction, and want to know what specific things you need to do, and how to do it to make it as successful as possible the first time.

• Way Before Class Starts
  • 5 Min Video: Clickers: Students and Teachers Speak Get motivated. Most useful quote: “If you think you can do the learning FOR the students, don’t even try clickers.”
  • 12 Min Video: How To Use Clickers Effectively Noah walks you through what it will really be like in class.
  • Look for Peer Instruction Questions in your course on this site. Non-CS people, see the CWSEI site. An overview of questions across 4 courses was reported in ITiCSE 2011 ( paper)
• Preparing For the Term
  • Syllabus Advice
  • Ordering Clickers
• First Lecture
  • Motivate and Explain Peer Instruction Process Example Video Slides (feel free to use and modify)
• A Common Lecture Day
  • How do you get students to read the textbook?
  • How to run in-class “reading quizzes”
  • Read Beth’s Experience Report: Peer Instruction in Introductory Computing
• Don’t Forget: Reminding Them Why PI is Good
  • Examples Video Slides (feel free to use and modify)
• Exams
• Documenting PI Impact
  • Please give a copy of our student attitudes survey
    • Email Beth (bsimon@cs.ucsd.edu) to get a personalized link for students in your class.
    • If you don’t have time, use this link for your class, and email Beth so she can send you results.
    • You can also use these on your own electronic or paper survey. But we recommend you keep identical wording so answers can be compared across courses.

   

Other Peer Instruction Resources

Specific to Computer Science

• Daniel Zingaro’s PI in CS web page

Must Visit Resources on PI in Science*

• The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative Clicker Resourse Page
  • Specifically the video Clickers: Students and Teachers Speak from the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative Video page (has 7 more videos on clicker use/peer instruction)

*Clickers are the technology by which the pedagogical technique that is Peer Instruction can be implemented in classrooms. However, common terminology in higher education often just says “clickers”. It may or may not be Peer Instruction.