Introduction

One of the largest barriers to adopting a new teaching technique is the startup costs in time invested. In this article, I share the ways in which I prepare for a class that uses voting questions as an integral part of the class. I believe it is possible to prepare for class in roughly the same amount of time it would take to prepare a standard lecture for a class that you are teaching for the first time.

One of the largest obstacles to overcome in using voting questions in the classroom is preparing a lecture which uses them and works well in the classroom. Effectively using voting requires a serious time investment in the classroom, so it is not possible to take a traditional lecture and simply add voting questions at pertinent points. We must rethink our methods for preparing lectures. The best strategy for me was to start with the voting questions that I wanted to use and then to fill in any additional points.

Let me begin by givingmy experience with clickers—clickers add technology to voting, but everything I say seems just as applicable without the technology component. I am a new faculty member and just completed my first year of full-time teaching in the Spring of 2008. I discovered clickers halfway through the Fall semester in 2007 as a way to spice up a linear algebra class that met twice a week for 1 hour and 40 minutes.