Expanding Your Teaching Toolkit
As a new professor, you may not know where to start with revising your teaching to include active learning, particularly if your professors taught almost exclusively through lectures. Good news! You can start almost anywhere.
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HideWhatever you do to move your students from a passive role into an active role in the classroom improves their learning. It also helps to keep them (and you!) from getting bored, frustrated, or loosing concentration (e.g., Felder; National Research Council, 2000 ).
Furthermore, incorporating active learning strategies into your teaching need not be difficult or time-consuming. Including even a two-three minute exercise after 12-18 minutes of lecture significantly increases student understanding and retention of material (Wenzel, 1999) . Moreover, using a variety of teaching methods (to match the variety of learning styles in your classroom) is one way to demonstrate your commitment to excellence in teaching, as you prepare your case for tenure. The resources below describe techniques you can use, and include hundreds of geoscience-related examples of classroom activities.
Active learning methodologies
- Ease into using active learning methods by spicing up your lectures with one or both of the following, from the Starting Point page on Teaching Methods. (The Starting Point website is a collection of resources for teaching entry level geoscience courses, but these resources are useful for teaching at any level.)
- Interactive lectures: Interactive lectures involve (usually) brief interruptions in your lecture, during which students process or apply the information they are hearing in some way, thus keeping them actively engaged. Variations include think-pair-share, Conceptests, and question of the day. This resource walks you through a more complete description of interactive lectures, briefly summarizes research about learning that demonstrates why you should use them, shows you how to make your lectures interactive, and links you to hundreds of existing activities you can incorporate in your next lecture. These methods can be used at any level, including graduate level courses, as described in this page about Keeping Research Seminars Lively and Engaging.
- Just-in-time teaching: In just-in-time teaching, students respond (electronically) to thought-provoking questions about the reading shortly before class, allowing the instructor to address areas of misunderstanding during the lecture. Well-constructed questions about the reading can encourage students to be more actively engaged with material outside of class, as well.
- Doing Collaborative Learning describes how to make collaborative learning work in your classroom, and gives many examples of collaborative learning techniques, including think-pair-share, jigsaws, several kinds of group problem solving methods, and more.
Search for active learning exercises in the geosciences
- Conduct an exhaustive search for teaching activities, or an even more exhaustive search for educational resources within SERC's "Teach the Earth" portal. You can search for particular teaching methods, or by content. Why not try both?
- Focus on teaching activities for introductory level geoscience classes, from SERC's "Starting Point." In this search engine, when you search by topic, you will automatically also have the option to narrow your results by teaching method.
- Search within SERC collections for specific upper-level courses or for specific teaching methods.
- Search within one of SERC's more specific collections, including climate change, using data in the classroom, quantitative skills, and many more.
- Search for educational resources within DLESE (the Digital Library of Earth Science Education), including "lesson plans, scientific data, visualizations, interactive computer models, and virtual field trips-in short, any web-accessible teaching or learning material."
