Clickers. You're doing it wrong.

It's hard to know where to start with this picture I found on Twitter. First of all, the sheer gall of the student to post this blatant dishonesty on the Internet!  I know this is not from my campus (we use a different model of clicker), but it probably happens here, too. (Still! Has she no shame?!)

Here's the thing, though. Beyond the fact that the student is being dishonest and she and her friends are cheating so they get points despite not actually attending class, if the instructor were using clickers correctly, this would not work.

It appears from this image that this instructor is quizzing his students, and asking simple multiple choice questions. So, Sally Student here (I removed her real name from the image) simply lines up the three clickers and punches "A" "A" "A" and waits for the next question. (Maybe she even refers to her notes, which are sitting underneath the clickers.)

So wrong!

Imagine this instead:  the instructor asks a question that requires thought. Sally doesn't know the answer off the top of her head. She has to think. To process. It takes all the allotted time, and suddenly the instructor is telling her she has to vote. She casts her vote, and is now kind of annoyed that she has her two friend's clickers to deal with. Maybe she votes for them, maybe she does not.

Now the instructor has asked students to turn to their neighbor and defend their answer. In talking it over (her neighbor had a different answer), Sally finds that she understands the information much better, and now when the polling is opened up again she changes her answer, because her neighbor had a much better description of the problem and her reasoning made more sense to Sally.

Sally votes, and eagerly awaits the moment when she will learn whether she chose the correct answer this time. She and her neighbor are still chatting about it. Sally is so engaged in the learning process that she forgets to vote on her friends' clickers.

Sally feels a little bad about that. But, she also feels that she was doing some hard work learning during this class, and that it wasn't really fair for her friends to ask her to do all the work while they get credit for the answers.  So she tells them that she won't be taking their clickers to class for them anymore.

Reclaim control of your clicker classroom. Make it more than "Good thing I go to class."