A few weeks ago, I had a bit of a teaching adventure.

I have a two-hour Friday lecture, and on this particular day, I brought NO slides and told the students that it would be a review lecture. For the next two hours, I would answer any questions about the material they’d been taught so far.

Happily (because I had NO backup plan), they went with it. For two hours, we did nothing but Q&A for a class of about 70 students. We talked about exceptions to particular rules, boundary cases, real-life examples, complex thought experiments, and a wide range of other things.

It was great—a full two hours of student-led learning where they focused on the topics or idiosyncrasies that mattered to them at their pace.

Now, I did “salt the mine” a little. Every undergraduate got a handout that included a description of running a ‘flipped’⁰ lecture and, crucially, ten ‘starter’ questions. These questions were different³ for each student and were randomly chosen from a set of about one hundred I’d prepared.

These starter questions did two things:

  • They took the pressure off students who didn’t have a question because they could literally pick a question and ask it.
  • They meant that students who did have a question didn’t pay a social price for being ‘that student with a strange question’ because nobody else in the room² could say for sure it wasn’t in the question database.

In practice, about 60% of the questions that students asked came from the question database, and 40% were original. That’s definitely more original questions than I’d get in a normal lecture, and even the questions from the question database were a small selection of the available ones.

Some things that surprised me.

  • The students didn’t ask any of the questions in the question database that I wanted them to ask. This was annoying because I like talking about things that interest me rather than things that interest them.⁴
  • The general stamina of the students was up to the task—about 15 minutes before the end, we started to get questions like ‘What’s your favorite TV show?’⁵, but generally, people were on board.
  • We’re actually still roughly on schedule despite having spent two hours doing this. I think I probably have been going through the material quite quickly.
  • The students mostly avoided the questions that referenced the recommended reading. I suspect that’s because most of them hadn’t done it and didn’t fancy either bluffing or outing themselves as having NOT read it.
  • I restricted coursework questions until the second hour because I expected a lot of them, but there were remarkably few. However, several lectures later, I had to abandon my slides in favor of solely answering coursework questions, so that appears to have been an accident of timing.

⁰ It’s not really a flipped lecture, but it’s close.
² Except me.
³ Probably. It’s possible two students happened to get exactly the same selection, but the odds are against it.
⁴ There’s an open debate about whether it’s better for the students or the staff to set the addenda, but I think we can all agree we should know what the student addenda is.
⁵ Bluey, obviously.