August 3, 2004
Just in Time Teaching
Yet again, I find inspiration in Jerz's Literacy Weblog, which is updated so often that I read it regularly. A recent entry on mobile technology muses over how cell phone customs might be behind some problematic student behavior. But in that entry he used a phrase -- "Just in Time teaching" -- which gave me pause. I'd seen him use that phrase once before, in an interesting entry about "just in time handouts", a plan to generate paper guidelines "live" in collaboration with the students in his class. In Pedablogue, I questioned the effectiveness of this method, arguing the need for a teacher to set the "rules of the game" before the fact. But seeing this phrase "just in time teaching" again made me realize that this is actually a catchphrase already in parlance that I was unaware of, rather than a term Jerz himself coined, and a quick google search on the phrase taught me something new. Now I realize that Jerz's conception of these "just in time handouts" is linked to a particular pedagogical approach outlined in a book called Just-In-Time Teaching : Blending Active Learning with Web Technology (aka "JITT").
The primary author, Gregor Novak, has a website dedicated to Just in Time Teaching that outlines the approach rather nicely and I hope you'll take a look at it, especially if you use the web for homework activities. In a nutshell, "JITT" has students answer prompts or respond to readings online with a deadline shortly before class meets. The teacher then reads this homework and decides what needs to be covered "just in time" for the upcoming class meeting. In theory, this makes students more active in their learning, better prepared for class, and ready to take their knowledge level up a notch. It also exploits web technology to help the the teacher tune in to where students are at, and what needs they have, in a way that ritualized lectures prepared too far in advance do not.
I like the ideals behind Just in Time Teaching quite a bit. It sounds good and I've used similar tactics to have students utilize web discussions before a class meets. In fact, I usually spend some time right before a class session to reflect concretely about my students' needs and either revise my course plan or come up with a new assignment "just in time" for class, irregardless of the web or homework I've already seen. Indeed, I'm not sure I always need to read this homework electronically before the fact to generate the same active environment in the classroom. But in principle, a JITT pedagogy is an engaged one, because it takes a workshop/discussion approach to the course in a way that may be more anticipatory than the usual "your homework for next time is to do XYZ" sort of manner.
A super approach. But the reality of the teacher's workload mitigates against some of this. One problem I see with JITT is the temporal burden it places on the teacher -- especially the overworked teacher who may have poor time management skills. Aside from asking the teacher to prepare the prompts and web materials in advance, it also demands the teacher do particular work at a very stressful point: up to the very last minute before a class meets. Will the teacher always be prepared "just in time"? What if they have three classes back-to-back? A night class before the morning "just in time" course? The stress of scrambling could weigh heavy and the looming deadline pressure and anxiety could backfire. If teachers don't carefully design prompts that can make the last minute scrambling to read everything optional, JITT could exhaust the teacher. And if the prompts are too directive or flat, they might not facilitate the upcoming class activities very well.
JITT prompts are essentially the same as any other form of homework, but they are tied into an upcoming class rather than graded after-the-fact. I almost always guide my assignments toward class discussions anyway, so I don't see this as an essential difference. The only difference is that I would be grading homework before a class session rather than afterwards. And that might be difficult to "time" given a heavy workload. Yet the principle of the idea is a very good one: teachers need to be just actively engaged in the class as the students are, and this approach forces teachers to do "homework" along with their students, before the class, rather than afterward -- as part of a learning process in motion, even, rather than as simply a product to be graded.
In any case, I learned a lot researching Just in Time teaching. In some ways it's a phrase for something I already do, a pedagogical approach to using the web, and a good way of thinking about course management. While I'm still not so sure that this would work with generating paper assignments, perhaps my reticence on that score is tied to my assumptions about the role of a teacher in a writing class. Regardles, I do recommend instructors consider JITT, if their students have access to the web. And if the teacher has a little time to spare before the next class begins.
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Thanks, Mike, for getting at the core of the issue around which I was dancing. Just-in-time delivery in a manufacture or transportation system depends on time-management... you hit the nail on the head when you identified some of the problems.
I can think of a few solutions.
I don't need to read every student homework in order to get an idea of what I need to cover in class... I might actually read about a third of them and kind of separate them into piles, and then sort the remaining papers into those piles, or sort the students into task groups to come up with questions.
It's a little easier to do this sort of thing with a writing class than it is with a literature class, but it usually works pretty well whenever the student thinks of a big chunk of coursework as an ongoing project with frequent checkpoints, rather than a series of basically unrelated hurdles.
On the other hand, sometimes the homework is simply designed to ask the student to focus on a set of questions before class... I will only mark whether the student has done the homework or not, and return the whole stack with few individual comments. Students who haven't done the homework won't be able to contribute in class, which puts them at a disadvantage. At the very least, this sort of thing helps me to identify students who may be headed for trouble. While sometimes the student will be annoyed when I approach them on a personal level and let them know what warning signs I see, on the other hand it's probably better than just letting them flunk a midterm.
It is crucial that the student completes the prep exercise far enough in advance that the instructor can review the work and make some adjustments. Sometimes when a student has blogged a good question, and a few students have already started floating a few answers, asking the student to walk the class through the blog entry is a good way to jump-start the in class discussion. I find that students don't always remember exactly what they blogged the night before, so it's not always useful just to ask the student to repeat for the class what they blogged about. On the other hand, asking the student to read the whole blog entry for the class is generally redundant.