A Day at Polya: Lecture

It’s a few minutes after nine and Kirk Trigsted has a couple of minutes before he has to go and teach his introductory math section before 200 students at the University of Idaho. But rather than review his few sheets of notes for the lecture he’s about to deliver, Trigsted is at his computer reviewing the homework his students turned in last night.

With just a few clicks he can see how each and every one of his students did. He can see the problems that were most likely to be answered incorrectly and which ones took the longest to complete. It’s a huge trove of data and information. And it’s available because students complete all their homework online. If done by hand, students would have to wait a week while overworked teaching assistants graded each problem; by the time it’s returned most have forgotten about the work and the class has moved on.

(You can read more about the University of Idaho’s project, how it works and other projects like it in The Course of Innovation, a paper released by Education Sector last week.)

Trigsted is one of those professors with a seemingly endless supply of energy. He doesn’t bound across the stage, but his lecture is clearly delivered with a strong level of passion and interest. But that’s typically not sufficient for students, and sure enough many of those in attendance, especially in the back of the room are just as likely to be reading a newspaper as taking notes.

Then a funny thing happens. After spending a couple of minutes making some announcements, Trigsted starts his lecture. Based upon the data he’d been looking at a few minutes prior, he starts explaining one of the concepts that most frequently tripped up students on the homework they’d turned in just hours prior. A few papers get folded up and some notebooks get opened. After about 20 minutes, he moves on to the homework itself, actually going through problems that he knows most students couldn’t answer. And like that, seemingly every student in the audience is paying attention.

What’s the secret? Unlike the traditional lecture where a professor talks on and on for 50 minutes, Trigsted made it relevant. He talked about things he knew were causing problems with his students, and frequently asked for their feedback as he worked through an example. It wasn’t a lengthy dull soliloquy; half the lecture was a help session where he already knew the questions students were going to ask.

Trigsted finishes the homework part, reviews a concept for the upcoming week, using a Diet Pepsi can as a prop, and then asks students for one last thing. At the start of the year, each student gets a binder that contains a series of questions and guides for working through the class. As they complete assignments and learn ideas, students are expected to fill them out. It’s the first time the math department has tried something like this, and it was done as a way of giving students more structure following budget cuts that forced section size to increase nearly eight-fold. Each week when the class meets, Trigsted picks a random part of the notebook that the students should have filled out from the week before and asks them to copy it onto a sheet of paper, which is then handed in. The sheet serves as a way to check attendance and make sure students are keeping up with the course.

It’s easy to tell who is prepared and who isn’t. Students who have been keeping up flip to the page, jot a few lines on the sheet and are out the door. Those that don’t sit there, staring at a blank page for several minutes in the half-empty lecture hall before halfheartedly putting something down. The one page quiz isn’t worth a ton of points, but it’s enough.

And that’s it. Fifty minutes of a lecture that combines mostly problem review and a preview for the week to come. The rest of the time students in Trigsted’s class will come to the Polya Mathematics Center, a 94-computer facility built in the basement of what used to be an anthropology lab.

Next, what it’s like to take a course in Polya.

Tagged as: Course Redesign, Course Transformation, NCAT, Polya, University of Idaho