Over the years, I have developed my approach to teaching as a response to the academic literature on education. Active learning (Bonwell and Eison 1991) has frequently been used in marketing education, and it has been shown to increase student engagement and learning (e.g., Hickman, Pearson, and Mundell 2011; Hawes 2004). A common finding in the literature (e.g., Renkl et al. 2002) is that student learning is most improved if a principle is first taught in a traditional lecture format and then supported with an active learning exercise. Indeed, many of the common active learning exercises (e.g., think-pair-share) are fundamentally based on the notion of bolstering the learning points already covered a lecture. In essence, the findings in the literature suggest the best approach is to be consistent: teach the topic (with a lecture) and then give students practice on the topic (with active learning, problem sets, and so on).
Although I strongly support active learning exercises, I disagree with the suggestion that the order should be “learn then practice.”
The experimental studies that support the beneficial effects of active learning strategies (e.g., Hickman, Pearson, and Mundell 2011) are very compelling, but these studies take place in the very narrow setting of one class session. How and when should active learning strategies be applied throughout the class session? Throughout the semester?
My answers to these questions have led me to an approach to teaching I call “harmlessly unpredictable.” My approach is “unpredictable” in the sense that I attempt to vary the types and timings of learning activities and lecture components (within class sessions and between class sessions) to such an extent that students sitting in class are unable to predict what will happen next. I adopt this approach “harmlessly” in the sense that I seek variety only with classroom activities; students would be harmed if I were unpredictable in grading and other such issues, so for class policies I stay consistent with my syllabus. With my “harmlessly unpredictable” approach, my goal is for students to arrive at class knowing the topic of the day’s discussion and having completed the day’s readings/assignments, but being unable to predict what will happen during the class session.
Allow me to clarify. The word “unpredictable” is not intended to suggest the class sessions are unplanned or unstructured. To the contrary, I carefully plan each class session, making certain each learning activity is driven by one or more specific learning objectives. Also, the word “unpredictable” is not intended to suggest the learning activities are wildly unusual. I do not use bongo drums, and I do not have a crate of costumes. As illustrated below with a few examples, all the learning activities are at home in a classroom. The key to my approach is extreme variety.
Theoretical Rationale
Why do I seek variety in the types and timing of learning activities? My approach is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives. First, I believe the “harmlessly unpredictable” approach helps attract and maintain student attention during the class session. If I were to use the same learning strategy consistently throughout the semester, the repetition would allow my students to adapt their attentional focus during class. For example, if I were to always begin the class session with a lecture (e.g., about a statistical method used in marketing research) and then if I were to always follow the lecture with an active learning exercise (e.g., giving students practice in using the statistical method), over time I believe students would adapt to my teaching by attending more carefully to the points of my lecture that would help them successfully complete the practice activity (e.g., the manner in which the SPSS output should be interpreted) while giving less attention to the other points of my lecture (e.g., the circumstances in which the statistical method should be used). In essence, I believe my students would settle into the routine by giving careful consideration only to the ideas in my lecture that students expect would be useful for that day’s practice activity. Another possible consequence of such a consistency is that students may exert less attentional effort to the lecture as a whole, based on an expectation that if they miss anything from the lecture, they will have another opportunity to learn it during the practice activity. I avoid these problems of adaptation by continually varying the type and timing of learning activities.
Second, just as rhetorical figures in advertising are effective because the figures mildly violate the expectations of viewers (McQuarrie and Mick 1996; 2003), so too I believe my “harmlessly unpredictable” approach is effective because it mildly violates the expectations of students. In an advertising setting, when consumers interpret the meaning of an ad that contains an unusual rhetorical figure, the viewer is resolving the ad’s incongruity and making sense of the unexpected. Consumers who successfully solve the puzzle of the ad’s meaning experience pleasure and a sense of accomplishment (Phillips 2000). In a classroom setting, mildly violating student expectations allows them to experience unusual puzzles and challenges, increasing their pleasure and sense of accomplishment when they solve the puzzles and recognize the learning point in an “aha!” moment. My approach incorporates more learning activities into the class session—I allocate approximately 50% of class time to lectures, 50% to learning activities—so the pleasurable “aha!” moments are more common.
Third, because I believe that students derive pleasure when they experience flashes of insight while engaging in learning activities, I conclude that conducting learning activities at a variety of different times during the class session will yield a quasi-random reward pattern in the sense of operant conditioning. That is, if paying attention to the class during a learning activity gives students a pleasurable “aha!” moment, then the learning activities will be particularly effective at encouraging students to pay greater attention during class if the activities are placed at seemingly random times throughout the class sessions. Of course, this is exactly the sort of placement that my “harmlessly unpredictable” approach achieves. Students can never tell where the next “aha!” moment is coming from, so they stay attentive.
Fourth, I believe strongly that for any particular learning objective, some learning activities would be more effective than others. In addition, I believe the timing of the learning activity in relationship to a relevant lecture component also plays a role in the activity’s effectiveness. Therefore, with a variety of types and timings for learning activities, my “harmlessly unpredictable” approach gives me a large selection of tools from which I can choose. For example, as shown in this table under Learning Activity 1, I created a brief discussion case that I used at the beginning of a class session on setting prices. The primary purpose of the activity was to provide a context for our discussion of pricing. The secondary purpose of this particular activity was to prevent an occasional problem in marketing education: students who experience hindsight bias when they are taught a marketing principle, which causes them to exclaim, “That’s just common sense. I knew that all along.” To accomplish the secondary purpose of preventing the hindsight bias, I presented the brief case at the beginning of class, and I asked students to describe all the issues that the firm should consider when setting a price. After collecting all their ideas, I began my lecture on the wide variety of issues that the marketing literature suggests a firm should consider when setting a price. During my prepared lecture, whenever I arrived at an element of marketing theory that corresponded to an idea that had already been identified by the class, I acknowledged the student who made the comment. (This is an opportunity to praise a student, thereby encouraging future participation.) Whenever I arrived at an element of marketing theory that the students had not mentioned in the introductory case, I simply explained the theory. (Making this explanation in a friendly and unaccusing way is important, lest students think I am scolding or mocking them for not anticipating marketing theory.) In my past experience, few of the elements of marketing theory have been anticipated by students during this activity, making it difficult for students to experience hindsight bias during the lecture. The timing of this activity was important in the sense that it could not have accomplished either the primary or the secondary purpose if I had used the activity after the lecture component. The essential point here is that the “harmlessly unpredictable” approach of considering not only the types of learning activities but also their timing in relation to the lecture component gives me more tools for my instructor’s toolkit.
Examples
The table on this website provides some examples of learning activities that I use as part of my “harmlessly unpredictable” approach. Typically, I pair one learning activity with a related lecture component. As a result, my class sessions are chains of activity/lecture pairs.
In the table, the “timing” dimension refers to the temporal relationship between the learning activity and the related lecture component. “Before” indicates learning activities that I use prior to the lecture component. Typically, I employ these learning activities immediately prior to the lecture, but I employ some learning activities that have a longer arc, including a few that resolve months later. In the table, “during” indicates learning activities that I employ at the same time as a lecture component. That is, I incorporate these activities into the lecture in a back-and-forth nature. Of course, the activities in the table labeled “after” are those that I employ as a follow-up to a lecture component.
As can be seen in the table, I take an expansive view of the definition of “learning activity” to include not only traditional active learning exercises such as full-length Harvard cases, brief cases I have created, role playing, and contests, but I also include rhetorical devices such as metaphors and extradiegetic interruptions of the lecture’s narrative (Messaris 1997). My rationale for including these devices as learning activities is that they are (1) sufficiently separate from the core of the lecture component that they are optional, and (2) sufficiently universal in application that they are useful for a wide variety of lecture components.
References
Bonwell, Charles C., and James A. Eison (1991), Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.
Hawes, Jon M. (2004), “Teaching is Not Telling: The Case Method as a Form of Interactive Learning,” Journal of Advancement of Marketing Education, 5 (Winter), 47-54.
Hickman, Thomas M., Michael M. Pearson, and Lee Mundell (2011), “Assessing the Effect of Randomization in a Spreadsheet-based Active Learning Exercise for the Classroom,” Journal of Advancement of Marketing Education, 19 (Winter), 11-23.
Messaris, Paul (1997), Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.
McQuarrie, Edward F. and David Glen Mick (1996), “Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language,” Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (March), 424-438.
McQuarrie, Edward F. and David Glen Mick (2003), “Visual and Verbal Rhetorical Figures under Directed Processing versus Incidental Exposure to Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (March), 579-587.
Phillips, Barbara (2000), “The Impact of Verbal Anchoring on Consumer Response to Image Ads,” Journal of Advertising, 29 (1), 15-24.
Renkl, Alexander, Robert K. Atkinson, Uwe H. Maier, and Richard Staley (2002), “From Example Study to Problem Solving: Smooth Transitions Help Learning,” Journal of Experimental Education, 70 (4), 293-315.
– Eric DeRosia