Great Ideas

I attended a seminar I heard about in the cognate course I'm auditing (EDUC 737). The seminar was called Active Learning in Engineering. It really gave me some great ideas to use in the classroom. They are simple, but they fit into the structure of the classroom I’d like to implement. Here’s my idea:

Student’s attention spans empirically drop off a cliff after 15 minutes, so I don’t plan on lecturing more 15 mins at a time.

Along those same lines, I’d like to have a timer with a buzzer to facilitate timing, much like a football practice. The key here is to keep a quick pace in class. One of the things I’ve noticed in my placement is that boredom == trouble. That's what I'd like to avoid.

Some of the activities to break up the lecturing that came out of the seminar (they are all intended as 1-3 minute exercises):

• One minute stretching: you don’t even need to engage the students in content. Our Sec. MAC instructors use that technique for our classes occasionally.
• One-minute paper: instruct students to write a quick essay that address what was confusion for them in class so far and what they thing the important point of the class was today. They came hand these in or you can discuss it in class, but either way it provides a good formative assessment.
• Summarize/clarify notes: another good one-minute exercise for students to engage the material using dispositional thinking.
• Have students generate potential HW or test questions: I love this idea b/c it stimulates more dispositional thinking by considering the material from a different perspective.
• Have students make predictions or explain new phenomena: this activity can activate prior knowledge or apply what they just learned.