+Teaching Tolerance
+Teaching Jobs
+TeachersPayTeachers
+Writers Club
+Learning Geeks
+Jobs in Karachi
+21st Century Strategies
+Century 21 All Points
+StudentAdvisor
+Student Life Network
Interactive Teaching Techniques
+Teaching Jobs
+TeachersPayTeachers
+Writers Club
+Learning Geeks
+Jobs in Karachi
+21st Century Strategies
+Century 21 All Points
+StudentAdvisor
+Student Life Network
Interactive Teaching Techniques
These
techniques have multiple benefits: the instructor can easily and quickly assess
if students have really mastered the material (and plan to dedicate more time
to it, if necessary), and the process of measuring student understanding in
many
cases is also practice for the material—often students do not actually learn the
material until asked to make use of it in assessments such as these. Finally, the
very nature of these assessments drives interactivity and brings several
benefits.
Students are revived from their passivity of merely listening to a lecture and
instead become attentive and engaged, two prerequisites for effective learning.
These techniques are often perceived as “fun”, yet they are frequently more
effective than lectures at enabling student learning.
Not
all techniques listed here will have universal appeal, with factors such as
your teaching
style and personality influencing which choices may be right for you.
Instructor Action: Lecture
1.
Picture Prompt – Show students an image with no explanation, and ask
them to identify/explain
it, and justify their answers. Or ask students to write about it using terms
from
lecture, or to name the processes and concepts shown. Also works well as group activity.
Do not give the “answer” until they have explored all options first.
2.
Think Break – Ask a rhetorical question, and then allow 20 seconds for
students to think
about the problem before you go on to explain. This technique encourages
students
to
take part in the problem-solving process even when discussion isn't feasible.
Having students
write something down (while you write an answer also) helps assure that they
will
in fact work on the problem.
3.
Choral Response – Ask a one-word answer to the class at large; volume of
answer will suggest
degree of comprehension. Very useful to “drill” new vocabulary words into students.
4.
Instructor Storytelling – Instructor illustrates a concept, idea, or
principle with a real life application,
model, or case-study.
5.
Pass the Pointer – Place a complex, intricate, or detailed image on the
screen and ask for
volunteers to temporarily borrow the laser pointer to identify key features or
ask
questions
about items they don’t understand.
6.
Empty Outlines – Distribute a partially completed outline of today’s
lecture and ask students
to fill it in. Useful at start or at end of class.
7.
Classroom Opinion Polls – Informal hand-raising suffices to test the
waters before a controversial
subject.
8.
Total Physical Response (TPR) – Students either stand or sit to indicate
their binary answers,
such as True/False, to the instructor’s questions.
9.
Hand Held Response Cards – Distribute (or ask students to create)
standardized cards
that can be held aloft as visual responses to instructor questions. Example:
green
card
for true, red for false. Or hand-write a giant letter on each card to use in
multiple choice
questions.
10.
Student Polling – Select some students to travel the room, polling the
others on a topic relevant
to the course, then report back the results for everyone.
11.
Self-Assessment of Ways of Learning – Prepare a questionnaire for
students that probes
what kind of learning style they use, so the course can match
visual/aural/tactile
learning
styles.
12.
Quote Minus One – Provide a quote relevant to your topic but leave out a
crucial word and
ask students to guess what it might be: “I cannot forecast to you the action of
______;
it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” This engages them quickly
in a topic and makes them feel invested.
13.
Everyday Ethical Dilemmas – Present an abbreviated case study with an
ethical dilemma
related to the discipline being studied.
14.
Polar Opposites – Ask the class to examine two written-out versions of a
theory (or corollary,
law of nature, etc.), where one is incorrect, such as the opposite or a
negation of the
other. In deciding which is correct, students will have to examine the problem
from all
angles.
15.
Pop Culture – Infuse your lectures, case studies, sample word problems
for use during class
with current events from the pop culture world. Rather than citing statistics
for
housing
construction, for instance, illustrate the same statistical concept you are
teaching by
inventing statistics about something students gossip about, like how often a
certain pop
star appears in public without make-up.
16.
Make Them Guess – Introduce a new subject by asking an intriguing
question, something
that few will know the answer to (but should interest all of them). Accept
blind
guessing
for a while before giving the answer to build curiosity.
17.
Make It Personal – Design class activities (or even essays) to address
the real lives of the
individual students. Instead of asking for reflections on Down’s Syndrome, ask
for
personal
stories of neurological problems by a family member or anyone they have ever met.
18.
Read Aloud – Choose a small text (500 words or less) to read aloud, and
ask students to pay
particular attention during this phase of lecture. A small text read orally in
a larger lecture
can focus attention.
19.
Punctuated Lectures – Ask student to perform five steps: listen, stop,
reflect, write, give
feedback. Students become self-monitoring listeners.
20.
Word of the Day – Select an important term and highlight it throughout
the class session,
working it into as many concepts as possible. Challenge students to do the same
in
their interactive activities.
