More active learning strategies

By Christa Bancroft, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Biological Sciences – November 25, 2020

In my most recent blog post, I described a method I use to get students involved in content creation for your course.  Next up is a strategy I use in a class where all lectures are asynchronous and live sessions are in discussion and active learning format. To help students understand particularly challenging material, I like students to work in small groups collaboratively outside of class to come up with a tutorial or review of that week’s asynchronous content and present the summary to students live during the next session.

To prepare for the activity my instructions are framed in this way as an example:

Dear Students,

Here is the homework assignment for this coming week:

Student “1”, “2” and “3” will give a review of Glycolysis. Student “4”, “5” and “6” will review the Citric Acid Cycle and Student “7”, “8”, ”9” and “10” will review Oxidative Phosphorylation and ATP synthesis. Each group will have 10 minutes to review the main points of each phase and major molecules that we should know.  Students can show figures from the lecture or post their own images to describe each pathway. You may collaborate on this via a Google Document or email. You should be prepared to share your screens with the information during next class session.

During the week, students will split up sections of the content to summarize and prepare to present.  This process helps them retain and master the information.

During the live session, students take the position of authority and share their screen during the zoom session, explaining the content they have been assigned and summarizing important details and information they believe their colleagues should understand.  The instructor facilitates this process by correcting any errors or further detailing concepts that need more explanation.

This process gives students confidence in their own understanding, ownership over the content they have created and some autonomy on how they are learning and feel most comfortable teaching others.

In an online setting, these small groups that work out of class together created a sense of social connectedness and teamwork. The fact that these assignments are usually given to reinforce the most complex material in the course, that will be assessed on an exam, provides a sense of purpose because they know that in learning and reviewing the information for themselves and their co-students, they will benefit from this extra effort later.

Finally, after the in-class review sessions are complete, I ask students to share the review materials as either shared Google docs or via a .pdf on the class website so that the entire class can use these valuable materials later in the course in preparation for assessments.

In my experience, using this technique over several years in an online class, students enjoy this process and really go above and beyond in their creation of mini review lectures.

For more ideas on how to facilitate student learning through teaching, please see this CET handout (attached) and their website: http://cet.usc.edu/resources/teaching/

I hope this is helpful and useful in your own courses!