Designing a Peer Instruction lecture
1. Planning the lecture
In a Peer Instruction lecture, you should aim to spend about 10-20 minutes talking, followed by 5 minutes for 1-2 questions. In a one hour lecture that means you can cover about 3-4 key points. There is no need to complete rewrite your lectures however. Start by reviewing your current lecture notes. Try to decide what are the 3 or 4 most important points that have to be covered. What are the three or four main things that you would like your students to know and understand at the end of the lecture? Consider cutting any material that may be interesting additional information, but which is not essential to explaining your 3-4 key points. (You might think about how these further topics could be covered in tutorials instead).
For example, in a critical thinking lecture on identifying arguments, I might decide that the following three topics are essential:
- Argument defined and distinguished from assertion, denial and explanation
- Identifying arguments in texts by looking for conclusions
- Identifying arguments in texts by looking for premises
I already have lecture notes and slides on these topics, so the next stage is to design some questions that I hope will test students' understanding of these ideas and give them some practice at applying them. I start thinking in general terms about what kind of multiple-choice question I could ask. An obvious kind of question for topic 1 is to present some short passages of text and ask students to say whether they represent arguments or not. Another kind of question is to present students with an argument and ask them to select which of a number of statements best represents the conclusion or a premise of the argument. That kind of question would go well after covering points 2 and 3. I decide then to have two sequences of questions in this lecture; one where students have to apply the definition of argument to distinguish arguments from non-arguments and a sequence of questions where students have to identify the conclusion or a premise in an argument. Since I only plan to spend about 5 minutes talking about topic 1, I decide that the first set of questions will go after topic 2 and the second set after topic 3, at the end of the lecture. So I now add this to my plan of the lecture:
- Argument defined and distinguished from assertion, denial and explanation
- Identifying arguments in texts by looking for conclusions
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2-3 questions distinguishing arguments from non-arguments.
- Identifying arguments in texts by looking for premises
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2-3 questions identifying conclusions and premises in arguments.
2. Writing the questions
I plan to prepare about three questions for each sequence, although I probably won't use them all; I want to allow myself the flexibility to skip over a question if students are finding them easy or if time is running short because some questions have generated a lot of discussion.
The first set of questions are straightforward to write. The main difficulty is in finding or writing passages of text to use. I make free use of examples from text books and websites on critical thinking, magazine articles, passages from books and so on, adapting and rewriting them where necessary. For example, for the following question I started with a passage from the book Global warming: a very short introduction (Mark Maslin, Oxford University Press, 2004) and simplified it considerably, until I ended up with the following question:
| Does the following passage contain an argument or not? The first major source of carbon dioxide emissions is the burning of fossil fuels for energy production, industrial processes and transport. The second major source is the result of land-use changes, such as cutting down rainforests. A.
Yes, this is an argument. |
I wanted to find a fairly clear case of someone making a series of assertions without (at that point) adducing any evidence for them, in order to illustrate the distinction between assertion and argument. The result is what I expect will be a very easy question (and indeed in the lecture I used this in all the students got it right first time). I like to start off (especially early in a course) with an easy question, so that students get some positive reinforcement and start to feel comfortable using the method.
Another useful source for questions about arguments are LSAT or GRE logical reasoning multiple choice questions. LSAT questions are published in PrepTest booklets by LSAC (LSAC 2002: The Official LSAT PrepTest (nos. 7-53). Newton, PA, Law School Admission Council). The logical reasoning questions typically have a short passage of argumentative text, followed by a multiple-choice question about the argument. The following question made use of an LSAT passage:
| Does the following passage contain an argument or not? Magazine article: Antitheft devices do not protect cars against thieves. Insurance industry statistics demonstrate that cars with alarms or other antitheft devices are more likely to be stolen or broken into than cars without such devices or alarms. A. Yes, this is an argument. |
Here I was looking for a short, simple argument which did not make use of any premise or conclusion indicators (words such as "thus', "therefore',"since', "because') so that students would have to think a bit harder in order to decide whether the passage contained an argument or not.
The next question made use of a passage taken from a critical thinking website (Lemur , at McMaster University).
| Does the following passage contain an argument or not? Often, accidents in the workplace occur because machine safety devices have been removed to improve productivity, or because workers have been given inadequate training or inadequate safety equipment. A. Yes, this is
an argument. |
I chose this passage because of the use of the word "because'. In the lecture I will be explaining how "because' is sometimes used to introduce a premise in an argument, but not always; sometimes it is used to state a cause or explanation for something, rather than give any evidence. That is exactly how "because' is used in this passage, so the question can be used to illustrate this point. Since students often struggle with this distinction, I hope that there will be enough disagreement about the answer to get a good discussion going.
Finally I chose the following passage from an introductory philosophy textbook (Nagel, 1987: What does it all mean? A very short introduction to philosophy.. London. New York. Oxford University Press)
| Does the following passage contain an argument or not? … the difficult and most philosophically interesting question is how we should feel about death if it's the end. Is it a terrible thing to go out of existence? … it might seem that death can't have any value, positive or negative, because someone who doesn't exist can't be either benefited or harmed. A.
Yes, the passage does contain an argument. |
I thought this example might be a little more challenging for students, since although the author mentions an argument at the end of the passage, he is not endorsing that argument, since he wants to go on to criticize it.
I now have four questions I can use in the first sequence. For the remaining questions, I make use of LSAT logical reasoning questions where the student has to identify the main conclusion or a premise in an argument. Here is one of them (LSAC 2002):
| Calling any state totalitarian is misleading: it implies total state control of all aspects of life. The real world contains no political entity exercising literally total control over even one such aspect. This is because any system of control is inefficient, and, therefore, its degree of control is partial. Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main conclusion of this argument? A.
No state can be called totalitarian without inviting a mistaken belief. |
The original LSAT question had five possible answers instead of four. Since I'm using flash-cards from "A to "D', I just drop the answer I think is most obviously wrong. This is a nice example of a passage containing a chain of argument. The main conclusion is that it is misleading to call any state totalitarian. The main premise is that state control is always partial. This premise is itself supported by a further premise: that any system of control is inefficient. So the example can be used to illustrate the fact that a passage may contain more than one argument and that arguments can sometimes fit together in a chain structure something I will be talking more about in the following lecture.
So now I slot my questions into the appropriate places in the overheads or slides I've prepared from the lecture outline and I'm ready to go. See the example lecture for a transcript of how it went.