Wow, it seems so simple and yet so powerful! Would it be fair to say that having a skilled teacher/facilitator is key to making it work? If so, how would you suggest “scaling” the collaborative learning environment to other classes, e.g. would professional development be required, and to other subject matters, e.g. would it work as well in subjects that don’t have such explicit/concrete problems to solve?

How do you see this as different from the typical idea of cooperative learning groups, which has been around for a long time? How do you avoid the usual criticisms of that, which include students who let one person do most of the work, forming pairs/groups with different abilities, and in the K-12 environment, teacher management of a large class? I have used the group approach for many years in undergrad math problem solving courses with similar reactions to yours. Thanks for sharing your success.

I believe the problem-solving studio is more akin to the architectural studio than to cooperative learning groups. Students work is public, the instructor and in-class mentors are constantly roaming the room giving “desk crits” of the students’ work, and the difficulty of the problems is adjusted in real time by the instructor to try to keep all students challenged at the appropriate level (i.e., keeping them within their zones of proximal development as much as possible). I’m writing a paper about this for the journal “Advances in Engineering Education” that will describe this in much greater detail, so keep an eye out for it later this year!

The students work in teams of 2, so there is no place to hide. Individual students are not allowed to do all the work, since we repeatedly remind them, and require them, to “share the pen”, such that one person is writing on the public shared problem-solving space, while the other is probing the writer with questions or offering suggestions for what to do next. The teams are long-term: that is, each team pretty much stays together for the entire semester, as do the pair of teams that sit at the same table -so there develops a sense of commitment and responsibility to each other over the course of the semester.

I can’t personally say anything about the K-12 environment, other than to say my wife is an AP Chemistry teacher who has adopted the approach with much success, so I know it’s possible. At the college level, at Georgia Tech in biomedical engineering, it also has been extremely successful. We have data that shows students’ conceptual understanding of the material, as measured by a validated concept inventory, increases by more than two-fold versus students who take the same course in a traditional lecture-based setting. Also, the students’ end-of-course evaluations are overwhelmingly positive (this semester the students rated the course effectiveness at 4.8 (on a 5.0 scale), which is extraordinary for a required “hard core” engineering course.

Really enjoyed this videos emphasis on pedagogy. I am curious how this approach changed the curricula being covered. Did it force you to concentrate on some units and do away with others? Does it take longer to let students work through the process? Does it make you go for depth over breadth?

This is a great question, and one I haven’t really thought that carefully about before. Thank you for getting me to think about this.

We did not really change the topics we discussed, but we did change what we emphasized, because we became much more aware of what the students were struggling with, because it became so readily apparent in this format. Basically, teaching using the PSS approach has helped to significantly improve what Lee Shulman would call my “pedagogical content knowledge”.

According to Shulman, this includes learning “the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others . . . [It] also includes an understanding of what makes the learning of specific concepts easy or difficult: the conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and backgrounds bring with them to the learning”

As a chemical engineer, the analogy I would draw is that PSS helped us identify the “rate limiting steps” in students’ learning, which then allowed us to focus our efforts in learning how to teach those things more effectively, while not spending too much time on things the students were able to pick up on their own without our in-class help.

Wrt to length of time the students work on the process – we now spend our in-class time on the things I know to be the most challenging to them. The other stuff, what I would call the “low hanging fruit” – they can pick up by reading the text, which in this class, they actually do because they don’t want to let their teammates down when they are working on these problems in such a public setting.

Similarly, wrt to depth and breadth – I’d say we go deeper on the topics that are most challenging to the students, and we don’t spend classroom time on those topics that are easier for them to learn through outside reading assignments.

Your classroom space seems perfectly set up to do this. Would you even try this if you were in a tiered lecture hall with those tiny desk tops?

Great question. The physical setup of a room can have a powerful effect on students. If they are in a tiered room with tiny desks, this sends the message to them that they are there to listen to someone lecture and they will not be expected to do any work themselves. In contrast, when they go to a room with lots of whiteboards and chairs and tables on wheels with a lot of work space, then the students have a different set of expectations.

So, yes, I agree, it would be much harder to do this in a tiered lecture hall with those tiny desk tops. Nevertheless, I would find a way to make it work. The benefits are just too great for both the instructor and the students.

But to be honest, it’s hard to think of how I would do it just off the top of my head – but I’m confident, if forced to make due with such a situation, that I would eventually find a way to make it work!

This also raises the point that the “higher ups” need to start thinking strategically about outfitting our universities with facilities that will support learning in the 21st century.

This course seems very powerful! Is it fair to say that it is learning through problem solving? So, the concepts have been embedded in problem solving tasks? How did you facilitate students’ independent thinking in this course? Is this a course required for every one? If so, have you encountered any students who were struggled with this approach?

Great question. Our data suggests that students learn more through the PSS approach than in a traditional lecture course, at least if you define “learning” as the change scores students have in the concept inventory tests they take at the beginning and end of the course. PSS students’ change scores are about 2-3 fold higher than the change scores of students who take the course in the more traditional lecture-based setting.

We facilitate students independent thinking by multiple mechanisms. Most important, perhaps, is we give them more complex and less structured problems than they usually find in their textbook. This makes things difficult enough that students have to work together to solve the problem, and they need to make lots of decisions and estimates, and there are multiple valid ways to approach the problems, which stimulates lots of discussion, and many misconceptions are revealed this way. So, basically, many “just-in-time” discussions about concepts are held, just when they most want and need that information the most, so they listen more carefully, and employ what they learn right away. So, yes, they do learn concepts in this class!

The end of course surveys are overwhelmingly positive: on a 5 point scale, this semester’s reviews of the effectiveness of the instructor and how much was learned were both about 4.8.

Many students struggled with this approach -most do early on, actually. But they quickly begin to see the value of PSS, and the vast majority end up saying things like “this is the way education should be from now on”. This doesn’t happen by accident though – I spend a fair amount of time making sure I am “pedagogically transparent”. That is, I explain quite often the purpose behind the things that I’m asking them to do. This gives them a framework for how to think about how they are experiencing the class, and when they begin to see the benefits of the approach, they buy into it, for the most part. There are always some students who wish they had more lecture, but the very large majority of students are very fond of PSS.

Finally, I’ve looked at ~ 300 students longitudinally to see how they do in the follow on course versus students who take the lecture-based version of the course. The PSS students, on average, do about a half letter grade better in the follow on course, with the biggest gains being made by the students with “average” overall GPAs. Students with relatively low overall GPAs who take PSS do not significantly outperform similar students who take the lecture-based course. This “bothers” me, and it is something I want to student and improve upon in the future.

I’d like to know more about the pitch you give to students about “academic grit”.

Sure. I basically use the concept of “grit” as developed by Angela Lee Duckworth, but I call it “Scholarly Grit”. I tell them that people succeed not because they are talented, but because they are gritty. I tell them the 3 components of grit are:

1. Conceptions of learning
2. Deliberate practice
3. Optimism

I tell them that conceptions of learning has to do with what they think it means to learn something. The absolutely most naive viewpoint is that if you don’t understand something in a couple of minutes, you will never understand it. In reality, I tell them, that any Ga Tech student can understand anything – it just might take some time and a lot of deliberate practice (the next dimension). In other words, learning is a marathon, not a sprint.

And, being cognizant that some profs still think, consciously or unconsciously, that some people are not cut out to be engineers, I tell them that if they get that message, either from a person or a weed out course, to take no stock in it. Reject that notion, because it is a naive conception of learning. I tell them that they can and will be great engineers, they just need to believe that (optimism) and put in lots of deliberate practice.

The concept of deliberate practice was forwarded by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson. Basically, it means you need to be reflective about your learning. You need to identify your weaknesses, and design your practice, your studying, to target those deficiencies.

Finally, developing expertise is a long tough process. To be able to do the above well, you need an upbeat optimistic attitude that if you stick with it you will reap significant benefits from your deliberate practice.

That’s what I tell them!! And I remind them of this at certain key moments in the semester, such as before or after tests, etc.

This is great! I plan to borrow for my general chemistry students.

Please do! Let me know how it goes!

The feedback from the students tells is out, " In alot of the classes that are lecture style you watch a teacher or the TA work a problem a problem and you think you understand it by their is a disconnect when you are not actually working the problem". I am sure many of us can relate to this when we went to a class and thought we grasp the material but could not really work it on own later on working on homework. Certainly team work is what happens when you leave college so I am not sure why it still not the norm in K-12 as well. How could you adapt what you are doing with college student to help teacher in K-12 innovate this way of teaching in all subjects that do not easily render themselves to work on specific problem like language arts. You have something here for these students now let us find ways for it to be duplicable for other subjects.

I am doing a similar initiative at the University of Northern Colorado, but the focus is flipped classrooms. Do you use any tools for direct instruction such as instructional videos?

I agree that that often flipped classes focus too much on the “videos” and not enough time on the in-class activities. I often give presentations on flipped learning and recently I have really been stressing that the face-to-face time is most important. Plan that first, then make videos as you need them.

Hi, I enjoyed the video very much – but am interested in the first question about scaling. Not just to larger classes but away from you, as the instructor as well as course designer. Do you have any experience of other instructors delivering your course? Would it be feasible/desirable to publish the course i.e. the set of problems along with guidance on likely pathways through the problems and ways of addressing common issues? And after you had decoupled the course from yourself, what do you think the limits of the approach might be if it were applied to different subjects and different age-ranges? Thanks.

I do not have any experience trying to teach others how to use this approach. However, in the fall, I will be doing exactly that – another instructor will co-teach the course with me, with the intent that she learn the PSS approach before striking out on her own. So that will be really interesting.

The idea of publishing the course -including a set of problems with the various pathways students take and are likely to get stuck on – is one I have thought about before. It definitely needs to be done, but I don’t have the time/resources at the moment. This gets to “pedagogical content knowledge” and the idea is to actually try to write that down so that others can employ the course in this environment effectively.

Beyond this course, and pedagogical content knowledge, there is also a need to talk about how to manage PSS in general, for any course. I just submitted a paper on this environment for Advances in Engineering Education which tries to get at this to some extent.

I don’t think there are limits to this approach. It can be applied to any setting and age-ranges. By that I mean – you can’t just take everything I do and cookie-cutter apply it to another setting. Really, you can’t or shouldn’t do that with any learning environment. Rather, one needs to understand the design principles that are in play, and build your own environment by applying those principles in a way that is appropriate for your setting.

Specifically, some of the key principles PSS is built on are 1) public work space, 2) situated feedback for the instructor and the students, 2) 3) collaborative problem-solving in teams whose team work skills are NOT assessed and whose work is only assessed formatively (not for grades).

The fact that the work is public is important – it ratchets up the students’ sense of accountability to their team and to the instructor, so that everyone is engaged and working hard the vast majority of the time. Also, the public nature of the work enables the students and the instructor to give feedback on their work, and for the instructor to get feedback on the learning environment itself and how well it is working or not. Then the instructor can respond to that in real-time. Finally, the students work in collaborative teams. This is a wholly supportive non-competitive environment. Students are not graded on their team skills, and their work is not graded either (grades come from more traditional individual assessment, separate from PSS). The teams are semester-long teams so they develop an esprit de corps and sense of responsibility to each other. Most important, because they are working together, they explain things to each other and negotiate with each other who does what when. Self explanation, or explaining one’s thought processes to another person, and hearing their take on things, and negotiating what the best course of action is, is a very powerful way to learn (see Michi Chi’s work on self-explanation).

So, my very long answer to your very important question is that I believe that the key features of PSS – public work, situated feedback and dynamic alterations of the learning environment in response to that feedback, and long-term collaborative non-competitive learning teams – can be implement with excellent effect in any subject with any age group.

Great to see the change in instructional practices here. I would love to hear more about how you have been measuring the impact of these changes? I did a quick skim and saw above that you did some longitudinal measures showing improved performance in the next class, and I’m wondering if there are other measured impacts that you did not yet discuss.
Also, regarding dissemination of this methodology to other faculty, you might check out the work of Charles Henderson and Melissa Dancy. They have focused on researching faculty adoption of research-based instructional strategies – supports, barriers, etc.