I now handle the Make Up Your Own question differently. Students in the past included their own question in their privately e-mailed answer to me; I now ask them to post their own question to our electronic conference. This also must be done two hours before class. The change is subtle but powerful. I read these questions before class, which gives me a good idea of what they're particularly interested in, and confused about. But they read each others' questions also, and come to class much more confident about their understanding v.v their peers, and feel much more fortified in asking questions about their reading. The development of a communal shared cognitive set is much more likely.

After the first class meeting, students are asked to respond to each others' original questions. This has several advantages. It promotes time on task, peer interaction (collaborative learning), and, since I can lurk on the discussion, it provides a great source of classroom assessment both before the first class meeting, and between the first and second class meeting to assess how well they now understand the material. With the new electronic conferencing technologies becoming so powerful, I now consider this form of electronic communication even more pedagogically powerful than e-mail.

You can see a sample of my students' interchange on Pavlovian conditioning and decide for yourself--would it help you to see your students' out-of-class thinking about the material as I can see in mine?

To see how this all fits together, see A Structured Unit.

a chapter from the text. I no longer use a text--my "ancillary" readings have become my text. As I had predicted at the end of this chapter, I thought the web would allow me to finally write the "textbook" for this class, and it has.

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