![]() One of my colleagues devised a great exercise: First, give students about half of their class time to write instructions that an imaginary robot can understand to draw a recognizable picture, like a corporate logo, without telling students what will happen later. Let students critique each otherĬhris Merlo: This can go badly if you don’t set some ground rules for civility, but done well, classroom activities like this really help open up collaborative learning. If you teach history, you might use flawed examples that change a key person’s name, such as “King Henry VIII (instead of King John) signed the Magna Carta in 1215,” or match a person to an incorrect event: “Gavrilo Princip is considered to have fired the first shot in the Spanish Civil War (instead of World War I).” Beam these examples on the whiteboard, and let the students’ competitiveness drive them to get the right answer before their classmates. In a particularly quiet or disengaged class, you can incentivize students with five points on the next exam, or something similar. When I teach computer science, I will make up a program that, for instance, performs the wrong arithmetic, and have students find the bug. What’s wrong with this example?Ĭhris Merlo: Students also love to find a professor’s mistakes-like me, I’m sure you’ve found this out the hard way. I wasn’t even sure what a couple of these students’ voices sounded like, but once I gave them an open-ended opportunity to complain about an assignment, they were off to the races. This one simple question led to twenty minutes of discussion involving all six students. I said, “What has been the most difficult thing about ?” This opened the floodgates-students love to complain, especially about us and our demands. ![]() The problem was that these three students were the ones I counted on to ask questions and keep the class lively! Once I was left with six introverted people, conversations during class seemed to stop.īy luck, I stumbled on something that got the students talking again. Due to a couple of medical conditions and a job opportunity, three of the students had to drop the semester. ![]() I remember a class a few semesters ago that started with nine students. All they take is a class with at least one student who isn’t too shy. ![]() Open-ended questionsĬhris Merlo: Open-ended questions don’t take any planning. Download The Best Classroom Activities for College Courses to engage and motivate students. I also knew that I had to find a way to make tutorials more engaging.”įrom these experiences, Merlo and Semma now share some interactive classroom activities for students and for teachers that can turn a quiet classroom full of people unwilling to speak up to a hive of debate, making the student learning experience more collaborative for everyone.Įnergize your college classroom and get discussions flowing. While nearly silent in class, my students were rather vocal in the endless stream of emails that flooded my inbox. “I chalked it up to first day jitters, but that same quietness crept its way back into my classroom for the next tutorial, and the next tutorial and the next. ![]() I dropped the eraser on my face whilst trying to write my name on the board. “It was a lot like parallel parking in front of 20 people,” she said. Semma, a humanities TA, found that the chalk-and-talk approach failed on her first day in front of a class. (They haven’t.) It’s the big things, like how they learn.” What I’ve started to realize is that it isn’t just the little things, like whether they’ve seen Ghostbusters. “In my thirties, I could still find a lot of similarities with my twenty-something students. “If we care about reaching today’s students, who seem to have a different idea of student responsibilities than we had, perhaps we have to reach them on their terms. ![]()
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