Informal Small Group Learning and Interactivity:
Taking Risks and Breaking Down Walls - by Steve Ackerman
Student Questions Guide the Course
The first thing I changed immediately was to bring more demonstrations into the classroom. At that point the interaction between me and the students became much greater, and that started me down the path. Some of these demonstrations are too small for a large class, so I started assigning them as little experiments for homework that we discuss in class. Then I discovered the Think-Pair-Share techniques and other informal small-group work, which I use to get the students to interact with each other and synthesize the concepts of the course. We also do storytelling-telling stories that I have and the students have about weather. And I instituted a "Picture of the Week" contest on the course Website, posting the weekly winning photo of a weather phenomenon. We then use the photo in class to get the students to make observations and ask questions.
These questions actually become the basis of a class session, which may seem risky, but the answers to their questions always cover course material that I want them to learn anyway. So I've actually taken that further and asked students what they wanted to learn in the course. I struggled with the issue that a lot of material that I thought we had to cover hadn't been raised as questions-how was I going to fit it all in? I suddenly realized that, no, I'm not going to fit that material in. If I try to do that, they're not going to learn it anyway. This is not a juniors course that leads to a sequential course in their senior year. It's much more important, in this introductory course, for the students to grasp what science is all about and how we think as scientists-and not to worry about the amount of material we cover. The students can look up the additional material in the textbook. The important things I want to teach them are to observe, analyze, synthesize and predict!
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