Just in Time Teaching

Just-in-time teaching (often abbreviated as JiTT) is a pedagogical strategy that uses feedback between classroom activities and work that students do at home, in preparation for the classroom meeting. The goals are to increase learning during classroom time, to enhance student motivation, to encourage students to prepare for class, and to allow the instructor to fine-tune the classroom activities to best meet students' needs. This should not be confused with just-in-time learning, which itself focuses on immediate connections between learners and the content that is needed at that moment. Just-in-time teaching (often abbreviated as JiTT) is a pedagogical strategy that uses feedback between classroom activities and work that students do at home, in preparation for the classroom meeting. The goals are to increase learning during classroom time, to enhance student motivation, to encourage students to prepare for class, and to allow the instructor to fine-tune the classroom activities to best meet students' needs. This should not be confused with just-in-time learning, which itself focuses on immediate connections between learners and the content that is needed at that moment. Just-in-time teaching was developed for university level physics instructors in the late 1990s, but its use has since spread to many other academic disciplines. Early work was done in the physics department at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in collaboration with physics instructors at Davidson College and the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Subsequently, JiTT was disseminated through a combination of publications, presentations, and workshops. Faculty members teaching in disciplines including biology, chemistry, physics, geology, mathematics, computer science, mechanical engineering, economics, history, English, French, philosophy, journalism, nursing, music, psychology, sociology, and writing have adopted just-in-time teaching. JiTT is used primarily at the college level, although some faculty members have used it at the high school level, and in graduate and professional programs. JiTT may be described as a method by which some or all of the time students spend in preparation for class is used to leverage the quality of the time spent in class. To accomplish this, JiTT relies on pre-class assignments completed by students 1–24 hours before class meetings. These assignments are known variously as 'Warmup exercises', 'Preflight checks', 'Checkpoints', and other names, depending on institutional settings. These assignments are usually completed online, either through a course website, or through a learning management system. The pre-class assignments cover the material that will be introduced in the subsequent class, and should be answered based on students' reading or other preparation. As a result, these assignments provide a strong incentive for students to complete the assigned reading or other preparatory work before class. For this reason, JiTT has been compared to the use of 'reading quizzes'. However, there are important differences.