Another easy active learning technique from Elizabeth Barkley’s SET book is the split-room debate. I use this one fairly regularly, in part because it is so easy to implement and requires zero preparation. Barkley says controversial topics with “two identifiable, arguable, and opposing sides” are best for this exercise. You simply have the students move to a side of the room to represent their position and then formulate their argument.
Community Norms
I spent the majority of my first class of the semester – or I should say, the students spent the majority of their first class creating community norms, or classroom guidelines. This exercise was valuable for a number of reasons.
Rethinking my digital ban
I’ve long been a diehard “laptop ban” advocate. Basing this decision first on intuition and later 
on empirical evidence, it was rarely an issue beyond the initial student grumbling. Among hundreds of student evaluations, a very small handful (less than 5) mentioned it as an issue. Although I included the caveat of “if this is problem for you, please talk to me,” no one ever did. Case closed, or so I thought.
As I’m getting ready for a new term, I read with interest this piece in the Chronicle on starting the semester. Basically, I read the whole piece, nodding along until he got to his critique of the laptop ban. I didn’t think too much of it at first; I have always stated that I’m willing to make accommodations, just no student ever asked. But then I read the piece from Digital Pedagogy Lab he linked to and I’m already singing a different tune.
Continue reading “Rethinking my digital ban”
The US Election in a Comparative Context
Teaching in DC, at the #mostpolicallyactivecampus (GWU’s unofficial Twitter hashtag), I decided to embrace all the craziness of the election season and design my Introduction to 
Comparative Politics syllabus around it. I bring the US in as a point of comparison a lot already – both in formal assignments like debates and informally during class discussion – but this year, I will be more deliberate about it. Knowing my student population, they will be watching debates and following the election like hawks. If I can tap into that enthusiasm, I think it will be a good hook for student engagement. Bonus points if it means they become move critical consumers of news about the election. Continue reading “The US Election in a Comparative Context”
Academic Controversy
We’ve talked about Elizabeth Barkley’s Student Engagement Technique book on this blog before (here and here). I thought I’d share another activity from the book that I used in my class last term, along with some thoughts on how the activity went.
Brief description of the activity: “Student partners review material on a controversial topic in the field that has two opposing sides (A and B) and brainstorm arguments to support their assigned position” (Barkley 199). In my experience, it works well as an impromptu class debate on a topic that doesn’t have a clear answer. In my Human Rights class, I had the students debate the U.S. response to the Rwandan genocide. The instructions for the technique suggest crafting mini-cases describing the controversy to print and distribute. I simply distributed one line prompts and expected the students to come up with the arguments based on readings and prior class discussion. Continue reading “Academic Controversy”
Treasure Trove
One of my active learning mantras is: avoid reinventing the wheel. If I can find an idea for an activity from someone else, I have no shame in adopting it for my own needs. So, I was thrilled to stumble across this resource (from my alma mater, no less) called Pedagogy in Action. It is part of a larger grant project for earth science educators, but the searchable Activities portal tags other disciplines. Seventeen activities are tagged as “Political Science”. I would also expect that many of the other activities could be modified for other disciplines. Each activity is described in some depth, including a discussion of learning goals, tips for using the activity, and assessment ideas.
The Pedagogy in Action website also includes a rich section on Teaching Methods with over 60 links to different modules, with even more resources and examples. Again, some are specific to earth sciences, but most are general (such as “Just-in-time Teaching”, “Writing Strong Assignments” and many more).
I’ve only started to explore this resource and I haven’t tried any of the activities yet, but I anticipate spending a lot of time on this website this summer identifying promising activities for next year.
Start the way you mean to finish (and continue)
It’s the middle of the summer and I don’t teach again until late August. But, I am thinking about first days. It’s an important day of class, but it’s easy to treat it as a throwaway class (that’s certainly how most students seem to see it).
What do you do? Most of us probably do the usual: go over the syllabus (to some degree or another), answer questions, do an icebreaker, and some of us might start teaching (to our students’ chagrin)
Continue reading “Start the way you mean to finish (and continue)”
Active Learning: What is it good for?
I spent this week attending a Course Design Institute held by my university’s teaching and learning center. The workshop centered on creating a learner-centered syllabus and aligning course objectives, assessments and activities. I thought I’d share a few quick take-aways related to active learning.
First, the facilitator presented evidence from STEM fields on the value of active learning over lecture-based courses. In particular, I was struck by two studies.
Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics (Freeman et al). is a meta-analysis that reviewed 225 studies comparing student performance in undergraduate STEM courses. This is the stand-out quote from that piece:
“If the experiments analyzed here had been conducted as randomized controlled trials of medical interventions, they may have been stopped for benefit—meaning that enrolling patients in the control condition might be discontinued because the treatment being tested was clearly more beneficial” (Freeman et al 2014: 8413, emphasis added).
Review Bingo
I recently discovered a handy website for making bingo cards. Review Bingo is a fun way to wrap up a semester. I fill in the bingo cards with course concepts. To play, I read questions matched to the concepts. I try to have about 40 concepts, so the cards don’t have a lot of overlap. Here’s an example of one of the cards from this semester (Introduction to International Politics). Besides picking the concepts and corresponding question, this is a quick and easy class activity.
Zero Sum Simulations
I’m growing disillusioned with international relations simulations that are, by design, zero-sum. As previously mentioned, it’s currently “simulation time” and I’m running two different simulations. In my upper-level Human Rights course, my students are participating in the Global Problems Summit, which is essentially a mini-Model UN. Although some countries may “win” and others may “lose” with respect to the content of any resolutions based, the nature of the simulation encourages diplomacy and attempts at cooperation and compromise.
In my two sections of Introduction to International Politics, my students are engaged in the International Relations in Action simulation. On the whole, I do like this simulation and think it captures my learning objectives better than Statecraft (which I’ve used the previous four years). The scenarios are interesting and have encouraged the students to think about a number of international situations and appreciate the complexity of international politics.
But, one thing the students have noticed is that many of the scenarios are zero-sum. Continue reading “Zero Sum Simulations”