CPS Best Practices

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CPS Best Practices

CPS is a system that combines interaction, assessment, and games to create productivity in the classroom. If you are new to CPS, you may be using only a small portion of what it can do. If you are experienced with CPS, you may have many new and inventive ways of using it that you can share. What ever level you are on, it is important that you continue to learn how CPS can make your class more engaging and dynamic. Below are a few best practices when using CPS.

In the beginning…

1. The very first time you use CPS, you may want to have someone in the class to guide you through the process. You may want to have that person there just in case something goes wrong and you need help.

2. Find someone who is experienced in using CPS and ask them to be your mentor. When you are ready to begin something new, let that person walk you through the process and help you get started. You will find it is much easier to start something new with a little help from someone.

3. When starting CPS for the first time, don’t think that you have to implement everything at once. The first semester you use CPS, pick a couple of ways to use it, and get comfortable with it. As it gets easier, try other applications and learn them well.

4. One idea to get comfortable with CPS is to hand out the clickers daily and only do attendance with them. Do this for two weeks straight and you will have mastered two things. You will be comfortable with setting up CPS every day and you will know how to take attendance.

5. Once you take attendance each day, you should leave the CPS taskbar on your screen. You can then begin to ask questions on the fly without any preparation. Ask your students if they had trouble with their homework or how much time they spent on it. As you do this daily, you will begin to think of many more ways to use CPS.

6. When you are just beginning to use CPS, always have a plan B for those occasions when something doesn’t work exactly like it should. Sometimes a new user may need to click something, but doesn’t know where to click or the technology is not working and CPS doesn’t work. He may not be able to find help for that class period, so he needs to have an alternate lesson plan for the students.

7. CPS is not meant to be an add-on in your classroom. It is meant to be an integral tool in the classroom that will help the teacher accomplish increased student learning. If the clickers are handed out each day as the students come in the classroom, they are available for getting feedback at any time during the class. That could be through taking attendance, a planned activity or for an impromptu question that is asked.

8. Consider becoming a part of a CPS Professional Learning Community. Here you will be able to talk with other teachers who use CPS and learn other ways of using it to increase student learning.

9. When you discover a new way to use CPS, please share it with your colleagues so they won’t have to discover it on their own. Work with others in your content area to develop CPS lessons that you can share.

After a few weeks…

1. Learn to use ExamView Test Generator to create lessons and tests that can be immediately imported into CPS. You can use questions from ExamView Learning Series, make your own questions, or for many textbooks, the textbook publisher has created questions to go with each chapter of your book. Most often the questions are correlated to the state standards. This can save you a lot of time.

2. If you have access to the CPS Chalkboard, learn to use it with the Chalkboard within the CPS software. It allows you to write on the screen and you can manage CPS with it. Many teachers manage their interactive whiteboards with it.

3. Write two or three questions before class that you can ask your students at the beginning of class to assess how much they know about a topic before you teach it. This information will help you know where you need to begin teaching.

4. Prepare several questions that you plan to use after you teach a new concept. How well the students do determines whether you go on or whether you need to reteach.

5. When you ask a question and several students miss it, do take time to see why they missed it. Do some error analysis on it so that the students will not make the same mistake again.

6. Use ExamView to create a lesson of 15 – 20 questions. Print the lesson so that each student has a copy. You can use this for the review game There It Is. It is a great way to put some fun into reviewing for a test.

Engaging Students with Peer Instruction

Michelle Shuster, Assistant Professor of Biology at New Mexico State University, uses peer instruction to help students in her large classes better understand the material she is teaching. She will teach part of her lesson and then ask an engaging question which the students answer without any discussion. If there was no clear consensus on the correct answer, she will allow the “do over.” Listen to her explain.