More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today:

Informing

“Informing” in quotation marks, because that’s what that phase is called in the AVIVO model which underlies the structure of the Methoden 2 go online! collection by EM Schumacher, in other models the same phase might be called something that implies more student activity, like “acquiring new knowledge” or similar. Anyway, here we go:

Building a cognitive map

I’m a very visual thinker, so building cognitive maps is something I do a lot myself and like to encourage in my students, too. Below is an example of a concept map I asked students to draw before day 1 (left half) and day 9 (right half) of a course I was teaching. I can very well imagine asking students to use the last minute of a lecture (or maybe the first minute of a break in each lecture) to add to their concept maps over time. In the case shown below, the difference between what students expected to learn about going into the class and then what they learned about was quite interesting (and also maybe a function of “oceanography” usually being associated more with marine life than with physics), but students were quite proud of the complex maps that formed over the relatively short period of only two weeks, and it was a great way not only to visualise the concepts and how they connect to each other, but also how much they learned in such a short time!

The suggestion in “Methods 2 go online!” is that the teacher presents a mind map of the topics of the course, and that’s definitely also helpful for students to see how what they are about to learn connects to last week or the week before (as suggested in the advanced organiser paragraph here). But I like involving students in the activity, too!

Learning-speed duo

I wrote about this method here already (and how one might implement it virtually), and now I read the suggestions for virtual implementations: Doing the first phase (where two halves of the class read different texts or work on different exercises) asynchronously and then just asking mixed pairs to virtually meet up to discuss their respective texts. This also works well, of course!

I feel like this is a very short blog post, but then this topic is so huuuge that maybe starting small is actually the way to go. There are tons of other methods that I have talked about in other places, like for example group puzzles, but I’ll get back with more later!

That’s it for today! Next #TeachingTuesday we’ll be back with methods for “converting”!

More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today:

Assessing previous knowledge

Pre-tests

Using a virtual voting tool or a tool that allows for very short free-text answers to assess previous knowledge before class starts (or at the very beginning of class) is great for many reasons. Doing a “test” right before (or the night before) class helps you prepare for class, because you have a pretty accurate idea of what students know and don’t know, so you might include a summary of older content or launch right into something new, knowing that you are meeting students in a good spot. “Testing” at the beginning of a class activates prior knowledge and gets students focussed on the topic of class (as well as informing you about where students are at), but it doesn’t give you time to do major tweaks to the planned program.

I write “testing” in quotation marks, because the word sometimes implies that it something is part of the assessment. In this case, it can also just be part of the learning process, providing formative feedback. Or you could give it a tiny number of points and have all pre-tests sum up to something like 5% of the grade — enough to make students want to participate and not just throw away the oppotunity to earn points, but not enough to put actual pressure on students.

Advance organiser

An advanced organizer is usually a visualization of important topics (e.g. as a concept map) to help students organise information and gain orientation of where they are at with respect to all that will happen throughout a semester. It could also just be a table of content if you aren’t feeling fancy. In any case, it’s good to show one to students in the beginning and talk about how topics relate to each other and how much time you are estimating each one will take, and it’s even better when revisited regularly, including updated information if the content or time planning has changed.

A-Z of a topic

The idea behind an “A-Z” of a topic is to find a relevant term for every letter of the alphabet, and describe what it means and how it’s relevant for the topic. I’ve seen those on scicomm Instagram a lot (for example @scied_alice did one on physics, randomly linking here to D for “Doppler effect”), and I can imagine them well in teaching — both to activate previous knowledge on a topic and towards the end of the semester to consolidate all the new information. These are fun, and maybe even more so if you can include them in some kind of social forum — sharing them on social media, or starting off each lesson by presenting one letter that a group prepared for that day. If there is no fun social aspect, this might feel a bit like kindergarden busywork. But I guess that’s the same for most methods: A method is only as good as the way you implement it!

That’s it for today! Next #TeachingTuesday we’ll be back with methods for “informing” students!

Remember my recent #Methods2Go blog posts, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go”? There is more! She kindly sent me the new “Methoden 2 go online!“* — bringing us tons of methods that are adapted for online use!

*this is not a sponsored post, all opinions are my own

This set of flashcards is structured in two parts: The first one presenting a lot of model using the AVIVA model (which gives five phases of a teaching unit: Arriving, assessing preVious knowledge, Informing, conVerting, evAluating (This works a lot better in German ;-)), and the second one listing interesting virtual learning tools. As already with “Methoden to go”, it’s a lot of fun to flip through and inspires thought!

Let’s get started, today with:

Arriving

Voting by covering the camera

Students use little pieces of paper (or their thumbs) to cover the camera to signal “no” as a response to a question, or leave the camera open (and thus their faces visible) to signal “yes”. This is great for a very quick vote on things, but also for students getting to know each other and finding out similarities (for example where they live, who has previous knowledge on or experience with what topic, …).

Awaking interest

I described the idea behind the “awaking interest” method in this blog post — this works just as well online as offline!

Feedback and interaction cards

The idea here is that teachers send out a file with symbols that students print and then use to hold up in front of the camera in response to questions (so a little bit like my ABCD cards, except with more symbols). At first, I thought this was a bit silly — almost all video meeting platforms do have chats and those “raise hand” buttons etc, but on the other hand I’ve been in plenty of meetings where messages in the chat and raised hands went unnoticed, so maybe holding something up in front of the camera is worth a try? Still seems like overkill to me to send out something that students have to print (also because I don’t have a printer at home and know how annoying it is if you need something printed during a pandemic), but maybe telling students that if they hold up a piece of paper with a questionmark on it, you will know they want to ask something rather than them just stretching? Might be worth a try!

“Wanted” poster

In order for you to get to know students and them getting to know each other, it might be a good idea to ask them for a couple of key facts about themselves, and to ask them to fill those in for example in a shared google slides doc, or whatever learning management system you are using. One question I like to ask students is to present their nerd topics (more about that here). Of course, it’s important to then make time to look through all those different presentations and acknowlege both the effort they went to and the content they put there. Otherwise you are sending a pretty strong signal that you don’t actually care as much about them as you pretended to when you gave this task…

Getting to know people via their virtual backgrounds

Ask students to set their virtual backgrounds to pictures that are meaningful to them, then let them talk about why it’s meaningful. I like this idea! I like to ask students to present their nerd topics, and while I usually ask them to post the pictures for that in a shared google slides document, for larger groups it could be useful if students kept the picture they talked about as virtual background so it’s easier to connect the topics with the names and faces.

P.S.: I am usually a proponent of avoiding virtual backgrounds as a teacher so as to not give students the impression that you try to hide as much of yourself from them as possible, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be useful sometimes ;-)

That’s it for today! Next #TeachingTuesday: Methods for assessing previous knowledge!

Another method idea from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions!

Today: a method to end a lesson with.

Cheat sheet

I’m pretty confident that anyone who has ever written a really good cheat sheet will not actually need it to cheat with later on. Putting together all the relevant information is a condensed manner is such a great way of thinking it through that learning is practically inevitable. So asking students to write a cheat sheet is a great method! I’ve heard of many colleagues who let students bring in one piece of paper (A4, or some other specified size) on which students can write anything they think will help them with the exam, and the experience seems to always be that student preparation is excellent. And even if students need to look up something from their cheat cheet (for example to make sure they remember an equation correctly) — what’s the harm in that? Then they had already recognized that this was an important equation to write down and remember that they had written it down.

What other methods do you like to end your lessons with?

That’s it, those were my thoughts on “Methoden to go” by E.-M. Schumacher! But, luckily, she just brought out a new product, Methoden 2 go online!, with which we’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday!