The Mystery Box

I attended a session at the Centre for Leadership in Learning today (CLL) on using WebCT and LearnLink (First Class) to manage large classes. One of the professors mentioned how she and her colleagues were using a “mystery box” to encourage student engagement and class participation.

The mystery box is a cardboard box, decorated in a rather ungainly fashion. The professor and the instructional assistant place mystery items inside the box and bring it to class. If a student offers a response to a question that requires higher order thinking, the professor may decide that the answer is worthy of a chance at the mystery box. She announces that the answer was “mystery box worthy” and brings out the box. The student has the option of choosing the contents of the box (sometimes good, sometimes bad–she said one time it contained only empty wrappers after she and the IA ate all the Hallowe’en candy the box had once contained!) or getting a perfect mark on an upcoming quiz. Interestingly, students often opt for the box, creating lots of anticipation in class. Apparently, one student wrote on the discussion board to say he had missed the class and to ask if anything noteworthy had happened. Another student wrote back telling him he had missed the mystery box, and he that he should never miss class in future because ‘you never know when the mystery box might appear’! I love this idea.

Another interesting suggestion for getting students’ attention at the beginning of class is to divide them into teams with geeky names and have them answer multiple choice questions.

This marked the conclusion of CLL’s four part series on teaching large classes. It was really interesting and well put together.

Peer professsional learning

As a follow up to my earlier post on roundtables, our professional development program is starting to take shape, although not necessarily in any structured way. Instead, topics have been chosen as need and opportunity arise. In terms of opportunities, we have discovered we have loads of “experts” among our peers and colleagues and I think we are doing a pretty good job of sharing in order to improve our common institutional knowledgebase. So far, we have roundtables scheduled on SAILS, problem-based learning, and creative commons licensing and its applications in T&L. We have also started using our (almost) weekly liaison meetings in part to learn about teaching and learning spaces and technologies of interest to liaisons, such as the newly designed Inquiry and Health Sciences Library classrooms, Articulate Presenter, SMART Boards, presentation and conferencing software such as Elluminate (we currently have a campus-wide site license as a trial) and PowerPoint. The last four sessions have been or will be given by our partners in campus A/V, the Learning Technologies Resource Centre (LTRC), and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences who is responsible for faculty development (among other things). I met a lot of these people at a brown bag lunch series organized by LTRC for various groups on campus who are interested in teaching and learning technologies, so there is a whole lot of sharing going on! Another session of interest was a presentation to the liaisons and the Learning Commons Steering Group by Dr. Phil Wood, the Associate Vice-President, Student Affairs, and Dean of Students, who spoke to liaisons about NSSE and student engagement at McMaster.

All of these sessions have provided us with an opportunity to meet campus partners, and to demonstrate our interest in supporting, and participating in, teaching and learning at McMaster. Oh, and I should mention that the library will be presenting at the Centre for Leadership in Learning’s Learning Technology Symposium, coming up December 7th. Tom Haffie, the “clicker guy” from Western, will be presenting on classroom response systems. How timely!