How to Use Just-in-Time Teaching
You can begin to use Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) in your introductory-level course with a small investment of time and energy, and the payoff in student engagement and learning are well worth it. Here's how:
Getting Started
The first step is to make some decisions about logistics:
- What technology will you employ to post your questions and collect student responses?
- In what course will you start using JiTT?
- How often and when will you schedule your JiTT exercises?
- How much will JiTT exercises count toward overall course grades?
Choose or Construct Questions
Once you've made those decisions, you'll be ready to think about what questions to ask. This is somewhat different from writing homework or exam questions, because the intent is not to determine whether the students have mastered the subject. Rather, the purpose is to elicit a rich set of responses from which productive discussion can flow. Fir instance, good warmup questions are usually more ambiguous and/or open-ended than exam questions. Warmups will sometimes ask students to supply their own data or interpretation. The questions should be chosen to focus on both the central ideas to be discussed in class, and the learning goals for the course. You also want to be sure that you'll have time to read student responses prior to class. You can either
- Choose questions from existing question banks, or
- Compose your own questions
Review Student Responses
Finally, review your students' responses to the JiTT questions as part of your preparation for class. This is what gives your students the sense that they are learning the course material just in time - because you are incorporating their answers to homework questions in the classroom only a few hours after they've done the work. Things to think about:
- How much time will you need to read all of their answers?
- A good rubric can help you to grade responses efficiently.
- You don't have to grade every student's response to every JiTT question.
The Class That Follows
Using students' responses as part of an active learning session make JiTT an especially effective teaching method, and differentiate it from simply assigning homework questions. Because your students will have done the assignment, you can use it as a springboard for any of a variety of in-class activities, such as
- a small group or whole class discussion
- a role-playing exercise
- solving a real-world problem
- an interactive demonstration
Additional Resources
The JiTT Economics website has a section on using JiTT pedagogy, including a step by step description of how to use JiTT.
There's a similar description of how to construct a JiTT physics lesson on the Just-in-Time Teaching Digital Library (more info) site.
