As part of increasing my teaching competencies I will do several workshops. The first workshop I attended was on Active learning. Active learning is about activating the student to learn. The basics involve creating the exercise in such a way the students will have to be active. The activity might involve limiting the amount of time or limit the amount of resources. Part of the process is to allow the student to take on the activity, make mistakes and learn by going through this experience.

When the activity is provided a clear instruction set is important. We explored the use of a simple exercise to make this clear. Two groups were asked to draw an image using simple shapes such as squares, circles, triangles, lines etc. After which, we would write down the instructions to create this image. We exchanged this with an other group leading to hilariously dissimilar shapes between the one we drew and the group we provided the instructions to. This exercise allowed us to experience an active learning process but also shows the power of a good instruction set. This exercise was very simple, but the lessons learned are powerful.

The activities we further explored were:

Movement

Movement allows the class not to fall a sleep and provide some activity in the class. You could allow the students to move to a spot to vote on a certain topic. To find a range of numbers, you could let the students arrange themselves in a line with lowest number on one side and the highest number on the other. A simple questions to ask the students to stand-up if they agree or disagree.

I like this and could actually be quite refreshing in the long lecture. I feel this strategy, if performed well, could help activate the class when you feel the students are getting tired.

Demonstrations/Visualizations

Demonstrations in class allow the students to get involved and show certain principles. Visualization with humor really catch the eye of the students. By incorporating demonstrations and visualizations with student involvement brings the principles alive.

I think the combination of humor and principle visualization/demonstration could be very powerful. Giving the students a moment of humor and amusement energizes the students.

Role-playing

This is similar to a demonstration, but it adds some more theatrics. Allow the TA or the lecture to act out a certain scene that would play out a certain scenario.

I don’t know exactly when this would be used for the STEM fields, but could be very powerful tool in Psychology.

Group discussions

Group discussions are very powerful as they allow the students to discuss among themselves. Students might be inclined to speak more freely in a group of their peers than in class. When directed the student can find goals/objectives, facts, idea’s, problems and solutions in their group discussions.

You can ask students to break up into groups and discuss among themselves what they think. Then you might get a representative of each group to summarize the results of the discussion. I think it is very important to limit the time of the discussion to make sure the students get busy discussing quickly and that not the entire time in the lecture is spent on the discussion.

The last part of the workshop was spend on looking at the use of technology. We reviewed some software that uses apps and websites to interact with the students. A couple that were mentioned:

https://www.socrative.com/ This website and tools to do quizzes, track students and others.

https://www.mentimeter.com/ This website you can make a presentation. The students can login with their phone and interact with questions that you incorporate in the slides.

https://get.plickers.com/ This allows you to print patterns and hand them out. You can use the app to scan the room for these patterns. As they turn the patterns on a side they will choose their answer. You can scan these and they will pop up on the slides. This way you don’t need to students to have their phone with them.

https://answergarden.ch/ This website does a word web, great for brain storming.

https://www.playfactile.com/ This app allows you to setup a jeopardy game.

These apps are great. Now that most students have phones, we can use them to gather data and feedback. I think this might also be distracting as the students will take out their phone and might get some notification. But, it might be interesting to use this at the beginning of the class or at the end.