Technique 17: Ratio

(Part of Chapter 3: Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons)

Your "Ratio" is how much of the "work" your students do in the classroom: how much thinking, how much writing, how much analyzing, how much talking, etc.  If you do all the talking (i.e., you lecture), your ratio is 0.  The author does not consider this a good thing, it seems, as he says the champion teachers have high ratios -- i.e., they don't just lecture.

Methods for increasing your Ratio:

1. Unbundle: break questions into smaller parts, and aim the various parts at multiple students.
2. What's next?: ask students about the process of solving a problem, not just the ultimate answer.
3. Repeated examples: ask students for multiple examples (of situations you are talking about).
4. Rephrase: have one student rephrase another student's answer.
5. Whys and Hows: have a student explain why or how an answer is correct or incorrect.  This takes the discussion to a deeper level and pushes understanding deeper.
6. Batch process: allow students to respond to others' statements, without the teacher's intervention.  But, don't let this go too long, and don't let the focus wander.
7. Discussion objectives: keep the questions/discussion focused on the learning objective of the day.  

The author notes that there is a difference between a ratio and a productive ratio.  "Releasing students to solve a problem that requires a skill they hadn't learned or mastered yet, in the hopes that they might infer that skill by trying, would result in students doing a lot of thinking but not a lot of productive thinking." (97)

My response:

I like this and I try to do this, in general.  I'm trying to get more and more away from the strict "lecture mode."  One of the methods the author suggests excites me especially: the Repeated Examples method.  I can see asking students in CS106 (intro programming) to give repeated examples of certain if-else clauses, or if without and else clause, or if-elif-else clauses.