Interaction The Interaction (strategies for classroom interaction) video includes the following four topic areas:
(1) Group Formation
(2) Powerpoint Teaching
(3) Names
(4) Participation Transcript Group Formation Student 1 I think it’s much better when you don’t get to pick what group you’re in, especially with me, because I’ve got quite a bit of experience with mixing with a lot of people. Student 2 I think it’s good when the teacher does it because I have a subject now where we’re able to pick our own group and I’m with only Norwegians now because that’s kind of what you tend to do - tend to keep to your group - and so yeah, we are all Norwegians so we talk Norwegian at all our group meetings and I think Norwegian and, I don't know, I’m here to learn English as well. Student 3 It’s very interesting to work in groups with international students, the language barrier is a little difficult and also just the way you go about managing a task or setting timeframes, it's very different so it’s been fun, definitely I think, a good experience Student 4 Sometimes it’s hard because you are just get in the new class and you have a lot of new people and I think that they should separate actually the class, say half the students who already know other people to form their own group and take and help the people who don’t know a lot of students and form them into a group. Jane Murray,
Senior Teaching Fellow, Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development The formation of groups is something that is extremely important to the subject, not only for the students but also for the subject itself. They learn about the size of groups, they learn about who they should have within their groups, different team roles but always diversity is right up there as being extremely important. Professor Jim Corkery,
Professor (Law), Faculty of Law What the groups are intended to do is to encourage you to become involved by speaking. Now everyone understands that students, if they’re sensible that is, are reluctant to speak in front of groups too freely and these small groups are intended to elicit information and also to see what intellectual discussion can be generated. It isn’t a' ticking off the box' type exercise. We will be looking for answers, questions will be asked of students sometimes but generally speaking an atmosphere is created, we hope, where students feel free to make contributions. Dr Stuart Murray,
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences So what we find is the best way to get people involved in the classroom is to actually give them roles, they go on and research the roles, they actually become quite involved in them, and people take their roles very very seriously .So it’s a really positive thing I suppose. Dr Beata Webb,
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences If group work is well structured, and if you give exact instructions as to what to do in that group work, I very often assign roles, in the cooperative learning you assign roles, so each student has got a particular role to fulfil in the group work, so as long as you create the situation in which people are interdependent upon one another and you structure the group work ,I think this is an excellent way of eliminating, for the students to speak in front of the whole class. Powerpoint Teaching Student 5 Others I’ve had some professors just stand there and just read from the PowerPoint and that is not good at all. I like it when they make it a bit active and fun yeah, spice it up a bit. Student 6 Especially the slides that they have. I actually really, really like them, it makes it a really good visual, especially [as] I’m a visual learner, so it’s really nice that they have stuff like that and they have their entire lectures, the professors do, um, entirely organised with the screenings and the different PowerPoints that they have, and then they pass them out to us so we can follow along Student 7 But you not only learn from like the actual context of the lecture slides, you actually learn from the teachers experiences and what they have to bring in outside of class basically. Mr Neil Roberts,
Senior Teacher, English Language Institute I think another thing is the importance of body language as well, and the importance of eye contact as well with the students, and sometimes if, if the lecturer is reading straight off a PowerPoint projector they shut off a lot of the body language. There is no body language with the eyes and the mouth because it’s all faced towards the board, which means that all of that communication just disappears Dr Liz Spencer,
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law And I think that the students enjoy the convenience of PowerPoints but I don’t think we should use them as a crutch and I think that, particularly for foreign students, but for everyone, I love to engage the students to get them involved in our classes, to get them moving, to get them talking to each other, group activities, break out sessions, ways to engage them and to break up the cadence of a two hour lecture for example. Names Student 8 Here definitely teachers know your name, like all my teachers here know my name. At home, I’m like one in a hundred, I’m like a number, so it’s like more personal here. Student 9 Also, I really like the tutorials. It’s really interactive with the professor and the students. I feel like they really make an effort to try to get to know us. Mr Baden U’Ren,
Senior Teaching Fellow, Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development I believe that sometimes it’s the little things that often make the biggest difference. I’ll give you an example, there was a boy in my class his name was Tobies [Tobee-is] and the poor kid was so used to being called Toby or Tobias that he came up to me part way through the course and said that he really appreciated the fact that I had asked him the pronunciation of his name and that I continued to call him Tobies [Tobee-is] which is the way that his name was meant to be pronounced. Mr Neil Roberts,
Senior Teacher, English Language Institute So I think it is really worth spending the time at the beginning of the course, in the first couple of weeks, to make sure that everybody really does know everybody’s name and knows a little bit about them. Participation Student 10 I find because of my cultural background sometimes I feel shy, so I might be needing some encouragement from other staff or the class mates to make me come participate in class discussions. Student 11 I think the most important thing of being here is like, the participation in the tutorials. It’s so much, so much more, I don’t know, active than it is in Norway. You kind of, you’re forced to participate and I do, I really enjoy that. Student 12 Essentially in my high school we, because of [the] big population density and the only 55 minutes per each class, so maybe we will keep quiet when teacher talks [or] have [shown] their teaching sound materials, so always ask a question after class, so it’s very few mutual interaction during the class time but in Australia I saw many students who ask questions when they really feel difficulties and their problems and the tutors were very glad to answer any response to you and make you clear and then go to another topic. Dr Beata Webb,
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Very often teachers misrepresent, I’m sorry, misinterpret the behaviour of the students and over the years I’ve heard a lot of the teachers, and actually again research shows us, that a lot of the teachers complain about the students from East Asia being non-responsive in class - that they don’t, they don’t know how to criticize, they can’t form their own opinions, that they never contribute to discussion and very often it is actually attributed to things that um, that have nothing to do with the real reasons for it. It’s attributed to the fact that students are not interested that students don’t have the knowledge or even that students don’t have intelligence, so it’s a very sad consequence of cultural misunderstanding. Professor Cynthia Fisher,
Head of Department (Management) Faculty of business, Technology and Sustainable Development One technique we learned when teaching in Singapore where no one was willing to speak up and have an opinion because it wasn't really polite, and the teacher had much more status, is instead of trying to conduct a large group discussion of a case I would put the class into subgroups, give them the case and questions and let them discuss it amongst themselves for a while and then we would have our large group discussion. I could call on each team to present an opinion and it was OK to speak out on behalf of the team’s opinion, so that way people got more involved.
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