In this Teaching Spotlight, Paul Simmonds, Physics Associate Professor in the Micron School of Materials Science & Engineering talks about the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) approach and how to implement it into your classroom. JiTT is a teaching and learning strategy that aims to support the use of active learning in class and to prepare students adequately for class time. In doing so, students engage in a pre-class activity (e.g., reading a text, watching a movie, listen to a podcast), and submit responses to this activity (e.g., they answer guiding questions, write a reflection, create a visual). The responses are turned in before class and the instructor uses these information to address students’ needs and interests. Simmonds has used this approach for many years and shares tips and trick about how you can incorporate JiTT in your teaching.
Video: Just in Time Teaching
The video has closed captions and a text transcript is provided following the video.
Video Transcript
So my name is Paul Simmons. I’m associate professor in physics and Material Science and Engineering. So I have a joint appointment. I teach classes in the physics department. So I teach a 300 level class which is introductory quantum physics, and I teach a split 400 500 level class, solid-state physics, which builds on what we do in in quantum.
What is the ‘Just in time teaching’ approach that you are sharing with us today?
Uh, just-in-time teaching is something I’ve been using in my classes for about probably five or six years, and I first heard about it when, um, I went to a workshop for new faculty at the American Association of Physics Teachers, although I’m sure it’s very widely used. And essentially, the technique, um, I think has lots of benefits, and, uh, this is how it works.
So you you you assign some reading before the class starts, um, which many of us do, but many of our students don’t actually do the reading, right? Um, so you assign some reading. It could be from your own notes, could be from the textbook, could be for them to go and find something online, and then you set a couple of short questions which, um, basically check their understanding of what they’ve read. And the unders the idea is that the the emphasis is on them doing the reading, and so the the sort of barter entry for for the questions should be fairly low, so they shouldn’t be very time consuming.
And I tell my students if it takes them more than maybe five minutes to answer the questions, they’re spending too much time on it. And I do a mixture of sometimes I do, um, short answer questions, and it should be two, maybe three sentence answers, or it might be multiple choice, um, but it’s really just a test that they understand what they’ve read, um, and I grade that, but I I make the grading sort of biased towards them participating. So if they answer the two or three questions and get them right, they get, you know, 10 out of 10. If they, uh, attempt the questions and they get one wrong, they still get eight out of ten. If they don’t do the assignment, they get zero.
So, you know, even just kind of putting something down is going to get them most of the most of the points. So the emphasis is really on just giving it a shot and doing the reading. That’s that’s what the students have to do. From my point of view, I then have to go in and grade their answers ahead of class, and I make sure that the deadline for their answers is two hours ahead of the class time, so I have time to go in and review.
Of course, I’m giving them the points that they do, but I’m also looking for maybe answers that are consistently wrong across the class. And if a lot of people are missing one of the questions or both of the questions, um, that tells me that my notes or what I’ve sent them to read is not really explaining that concept to them very well. And so this is where the just in time part comes in.
I can adjust what I’m planning to cover in class to cover that concept or those Concepts in Greater detail, um, and make sure I really, um, give them the understanding that they didn’t get from the reading. Uh, on the other on the other hand, of course, all right, if the class get everything right, then that tells me that they have understood the concepts. I don’t need to drill down into those as much during the class session, and I can spend more time on other things.
And so it allows me just to kind of get a sense for where they are coming into the class and helps me to just to fine-tune what I’m going to talk about, uh, and and the material I’m going to cover during class. So that’s how it works. Um, and yeah, I feel like it it really it really does benefit, um, me. All right, I can I can I can make sure my classes hopefully as effective as possible, and I’m covering material which they need. And, uh, from the student’s point of view, there isn’t there is an additional amount of work they have to do.
So the reading may be a chapter from the book or something, um, which I imagine might take them half an hour or so before each class session. But the benefits are that they come in with some kind of basic level of knowledge about what we’re going to cover and that they it’s not like they’re coming into a class session on the Schrodinger equation and they’ve never heard of the schroding equation, right? Um, and so that I think that sort of base base level that I can assume everyone in the class has really helps us all to start on the same page.
Yeah, so that’s that’s that in a nutshell is the just in time teaching, at least as I use it. It’s been a while since I had the formal kind of introduction on it, and maybe I’m missing some of the nuances, but that’s how I’ve been using it, and it seems to work in that in that regard for for my classes.
What inspired you to try this teaching practice in your class?
Yeah, there were a few things I was very eager. Okay, so when I first started Boise State, I had no teaching experience, like many, many new faculty. You know, all my efforts were spent on research. And and so I did what again, which probably a lot of people do, is just to do the whole lecture, stand up there right on the board for an hour and a half and then go home. And it became quickly clear to me that there were other perhaps more effective ways of teaching. So by going to workshops at the CTL and speaking to other people and attending this new faculty Workshop in DC at the AAPT, that kind of opened my eyes to different different um approaches I could incorporate into my classes.
And this seemed to be one that was a fairly approachable thing that I could do. It wasn’t like flipping my whole classroom or something. I needed to assign some reading, I need to assign some some questions, I need you to do some grading, but really it wasn’t it wasn’t a huge a huge amount of work. And so I just wanted to try it out and see if it would be beneficial.
Uh, so that was one that was one thing that prompted me. Another thing actually that prompted me was prior knowledge that I was assuming the students had from taking their prereqs. So in in mathematics, I was assuming that they knew how to do just like multiplication of vectors, dot products, cross products, or like, you know, using simple complex number for whatever reason, you know, there were students each year who couldn’t remember that.
Maybe they took those classes a long time ago and things like that. And and it used to kind of frustrate me, I’ll be honest, that people didn’t have this kind of what I would consider basic knowledge. And so I I thought about how I could how I could take away that that sense of frustration.
And so what I do now is I build in some review questions into those just in time assignments on the topics which I need them to be familiar with, and I I even give them a little cheat sheet, a review of, you know, the Euler Identity or whatever it happens to be, uh, that I I need them to have for that class session. And then they have to answer the question on it, and it just forces them to kind of go back and review those topics which they did in the past.
So it’s good for them, they get to review it. It means I don’t get stressed out, and everyone’s everyone’s a winner. So there’s lots of there’s lots of ways that you can use this, um, and those those were some of the ways that are some of the things that prompted me to start to start using it.
What tips do you have for faculty that might want to try this, but could potentially feel hesitant?
As I said, I think I think out of all the the active learning or whatever people call it now, you know, high impact practices anyway, uh, I think it’s I think it really is one of the one of the quote-unquote easiest things you can you can try with, you know, with with spending a little time thinking about what you want students to know come into your class, assigning something to read, and just setting a couple of easy questions to to test their knowledge.
It’s probably stuff that you’ve already thought about even before, what do you want them to know before they come into the class? Um, and so I think it I think it is it is one of the more approachable um things that I I heard about.
The other thing I’ll say is that I started asking my students in the end of semester, you know, course evaluations, I I added my own questions, and they were, did you do all the just in time teaching assignment? And they was 100 answer yes, which is definitely not true because I grade them, so I know it’s not true, but they always say 100 yes.
Then I asked them, did you find it useful? Did you could you see the benefit of doing this? And you know, there’s always a few people who put one and two, but the vast majority of the class put four and five saying that they they definitely see how it benefited them.
And the third question I ask is, would you like to have a just just in time teaching in future classes? And again, there’s there’s a range, but the majority of people say that they would like to see just-in-time assignments in their future classes.
And so for people that are hesitant about um adopting this or at least just trying it out, I would say that at least from my very small uh data set of what I know a few hundred students I’ve done this with over the last six years, the majority of them, they may not enjoy doing the extra region, but they can see the benefit of it and they can and they uh and they tell me that they would like to see this in future glasses.
And so if students are telling me that they they they like it and they they would like to see more of it and the amount of work needed to, you know, to to get it started is is comparatively low, I’d say give it a shot.