In the book “The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: Building Climate Courage” by Hamann et al. (2025), I came across Wandercoaching, a peer-coaching initiative for sustainability initiatives at universities. They share the materials they use here, and I really liked the “tools for your sustainable university” guide full of different methods — many of them […]
The “jigsaw method” is used for cooperative learning (and Anja Møgelvang explains here what that is). In a nutshell, let’s say we have a group of 25 students. We can split them into 5 groups à 5 students each. That is their home group, that they sit at one group table with for the duration […]
This blogpost is mostly a note to myself so that I don’t have to search for the database of methods for non-violent protest and persuasion next time I need it! Almost 200 methods, what a treasure for inspiration! They are grouped into “protest and persuasion”, “non-cooperation” and “intervention” (getting more and more confrontational), each with […]
Yesterday, a colleague pointed me to Microsoft Reflect, “A well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”, and I had a quick play. It’s a tool to support reflection in educational settings (something that I am thinking about a lot in the context of teaching sustainability). Since it is not designed specifically for use in […]
I am a huge fan of Kjersti‘s excellent teaching, it is always so inspiring! She, together with Hans-Christian, developed a jigsaw method to structure preparation for a student cruise, the cruise itself, and then writing of cruise reports. We wrote it up and submitted it for a forthcoming book on field teaching (which I will […]
Unfortunately, I can’t join the iEarth GeoLearning Forum in person today, but at least I can be there in spirit (and contribute with a Bingo to be played during an active lunch break). The idea is to get students and teachers and staff talking to each other, about their experiences learning and teaching, and also […]
We have recently shared our experiences with a Bingo game to nudge students to make the most out of fieldwork (Glessmer et al., 2023), and I have created Bingos for other purposes, like designing courses with Universal Design for Learning in mind, or for my freediving club’s summer camp, or the iEarth GeoLearning Forum 2023 (yes, […]
One thing that often surprises me is how seriously many teachers take teaching methods. As in, there must be fixed times for each of the phases of think-pair-share. Or there is an exact percentage of students that must answer a question correctly for a teacher to move on to the next topic. Or that sort […]
As you’ve seen from my recent Biodiversity Collage posts, I have gotten into serious games as tools for teaching. Today, I am reading up on a different game, the Climate Fresk (which I also got introduced to when I got to play it in a workshop led by my awesome colleague Léa Lévy, and which […]
There are a ton of things on my to-do list for this week before I go on vacation, but I really don’t want to do any of them right now, and so much not so that I, instead, just put together a “UDL bingo” that we can use to challenge ourselves! (Procrastination is best when […]
Things I didn’t try beforehand and that still worked out well: asking participants to brainstorm what students do who perform well in their courses, what less successful students do, collecting & clustering keywords for both on the whiteboard, and then projecting a picture from our Active Divers freediving training on top to stress the point that […]
I just tried automated subtitles in pptx slides and they are SO GOOD!!! I had known for quite a while that this option exists, but had so many excuses for why I wasn’t using it. Like English isn’t my first language, pptx will probably not understand me anyway… But turns out that it does, and […]
My awesome LTH colleague Léa Lévy invited me to a workshop she was doing with some of her colleagues yesterday, where we played a serious game on biodiversity in order to test if it might work as a teaching tool in their context. The game, “The Biodiversity Collage“, is about collaboratively organizing a growing deck of […]
In a workshop here at LTH led by Peter Felten in December, I wrote down something he said after having asked participants to think about stories of personal experiences to exemplify a point, and that was to talk about positive experiences using “I”, and negative ones using the third person, because that’s “psychologically better” (even […]
A great teaching method that engages students with literature, and that Cathy Bovill recently introduced me to, are “doughnut rounds”: Students (or workshop participants) are asked to read an article and formulate a certain number of questions, that are then discussed in groups. This leads to people being able to fill in gaps in their […]
One deliverable in our #CoCreatingGFI project (which has a new website! Check it out here!) are a set of postcards to share our experiences with co-creation with other teachers and students — to invite discussions and inspire them to adapt the ideas for their own purposes. And we have designed the first five now! Click […]
Yesterday morning, we had a very interesting “teaching breakfast” as part of #CoCreatingGFI: Anja Møgelvang introduced us to Cooperative Learning. Anja is a PhD student at the Center for Excellence in Biology teaching BioCEED, and in addition has 15 years of experience in high school teaching, and 5 in teacher education, so who better suited […]
A colleague recently sent me a great article by Peter Kirn: “So yeah, let’s just use plug and socket — industry group recommends obvious change in terminology“. In the article, it is pointed out that the “male” and “female” terminology, referring to and how cables are connected together, is problematic and should be avoided in […]
One of iEarth’s stated goals is to develop “local field laboratories” at at least three out of its four member institutions: UiB, UiO, UiT, and UNIS. But what exactly a “local field laboratory” is, and why it actually should enhance learning, is yet to be figured out. In a discussion with iEarth colleagues yesterday, we […]
This week I spent in a really interesting position: Sitting in the back of a workshop on “introduction to teaching and learning in higher education”, occasionally giving inputs, for example on microaggressions or Universal Design for Learning. And, this morning, about dance as a metaphor for learning and teaching. I first came across this metaphor […]
This week, we got super exciting news: Kjersti‘s and my proposal to the active learning call by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Competence (HK-dir) got funded (perfect timing, since our article on co-creating learning on oceanography was also published this week!)! Below I’m sharing the translation of an interview that Kjersti gave to […]
I’ve been a fan of working with rubrics for a long time, but somehow I don’t seem to have blogged about it. So here we go! Rubrics are basically tables of learning outcomes. The rows give different criteria that are to be assessed, and then performance at (typically three) different levels is described. Below, I’ll […]
Participation in shared production of artefacts is a great way to learn in a community, because putting things on paper (or, as we will see later, on online slides or physical whiteboards) requires a clearer articulation of the topic of discussion, and a level of commitment to a shared meaning (Wenger, 1998). We give two […]
I’ve been talking about the importance of leaving room for topics that students are really interested in for a long time. Today, I want to tell you about my first experience with this: Back in 2012, in my first year teaching the “introduction to oceanography course”, a student came up to me after the first […]
I got permission to publish Kjersti Daae‘s iEarth conversation on teaching (with Torgny Roxå and myself in April 2021) on my blog! Thanks, Kjersti :-) Here we go: I teach in an introductory course in meteorology and oceanography (GEOF105) at the geophysical institute, UiB. The students come from two different study programs: BSc in climate, […]
I just love giving students choice: It instantly makes them more motivated and engaged! Especially when it comes to big and important tasks like assessments. One thing that I have great experience with is letting students choose the format of a cruise or lab report. After all, if writing a classical lab report isn’t a […]
Last week, Kjersti Daae and I gave a virtual presentation at the iSSOTL conference, and here is a short summary. We presented an ongoing teaching innovation project, funded by Olsen legat and conducted together with Jakob Skavang, Elin Darelius and Camille Li, that we started last year at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen: Bringing together […]
More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today: Evaluating Flashlight I used to hate it when in in-person workshops everybody was asked to give a statement at the end, about what the most important thing was they learned, or how they liked something, or that kind of thing because on the […]
More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today: Converting Battle of theories The idea in this method is that students asynchronously read up on certain theories and prepare to defend them against other theories. In a video call, a handful of students than “battle” while the rest takes on roles like […]
Speaking about co-creating learning and giving students choice in what they learn, one thing that I have found to work really well is to sometimes present different options. For example, in my workshops on university teaching, there are some topics that are always requested, even if they are not part of the planned content for […]
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 […]
Kjersti Daae and I led the CHESS/iEarth joint course on “communication skills in outreach and teaching” in Bergen in September 2021; here is a short summary: CHESS is training the climate scientists of tomorrow, iEarth is changing teaching culture in Norwegian geosciences. Naturally, PhD students from both centres have a lot to talk about, and […]
Heat fluxes are a topic that at first seems pretty theoretical, but with which we have tons of experiences in our everyday lives! A quick brainstorm for where we experience different types of heat fluxes gives so many examples: having a lid on a pot suppresses convective heat fluxes beyond the lid! coming out of […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’m currently leading another virtual 3-day workshop on “introduction to university teaching”, and yesterday I left a prompt on the shared slide deck we are working on, “Things I wanted to say but didn’t get the chance…”, for participants to react to when they gave me the continue, start, stop feedback on that day. As I […]
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 […]
Maybe it’s a German thing, but we have had student representatives starting as early as in primary school: two students per class, a boy and a girl, that get selected by the class and that have the mandate to speak for the whole group whenever the teacher wants easy access to what the class thinks […]
This summer I had a fun little side project: I was co-supervising a Bachelor thesis in geography at Kiel University! Janina Dreeßen, with Katja Kuhwald as her main supervisor, did an excellent job, and I am presenting her work at the #FieldWorkFix conference today. If you can’t join later, here are my slides and what […]
More method ideas from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions! Today: methods to secure results. Learning walk I’ve been using plenty of virtual “gallery walkes” recently, where students have worked on a joint google slides document (either each on their own slide, or each group on their own slide) and we then go […]
Another method idea from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions! Today: a method to apply knowledge. Application cards I really like the idea behind “application cards”: the teacher writes a theory, technical term or other important keyword on one side of flashcards, students then come up with an application, a concrete example or […]
More method ideas from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions! Today: methods to discuss content. Amplifier The idea of using an “amplifier” is really simple: after a mini lecture, students are asked to write questions on what they just heard on a piece of paper and hand it to a “lead-learner” or “amplifier”, […]
More method ideas from E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden to go” pool of suggestions! Today: methods to acquire knowledge. Learning-speed duo The “learning-speed duo” method works like this: The group is split into two, and everybody in each of the two sub-group gets the same text to read (or exercise to work on) individually. When people finish […]
“Methoden to go” by E.-M. Schumacher, which you see in the picture above, is a handy collection of well- and less-well-known methods for university teaching, organised by the six different phases of a typical session (getting into a topic, learning about a topic, discussing it, applying knowledge, securing results, and ending a lesson). It’s a collection […]
I just had this fun (I think) idea of a “teaching inspiration dispenser” for faculty development (inspired by Laura’s Instagram post on her experience with a @shortedition kiosk): I basically want a receipt printer, located somewhere centrally on campus, that gives out small pieces of paper with teaching inspiration or tips when people press a button. It […]
I’m still inspired by Cathy’s work on “co-creation”, and an episode of “Lecture Breakers” (I think the first one on student engagement techniques where they talked about letting students choose the format of the artefact they do for assessment purposes; but I binge-listened, and honestly, they are all inspiring!). And something that Sam recently said […]
Kjersti and I have been talking about asking students to take turns and write summaries of lectures throughout the whole semester. We would then give feedback on them to make sure we get a final result that is correct (and that the student learns something, obviously). The summaries are then collected into a booklet that […]
The first lecture I attended as a student wasn’t actually a regular lecture, even though I did not know that at the time. It was an intervention. Together with about a hundred or so new students, I sat nervously in a lecture theatre in the physics department. I had enrolled in physical oceanography, which was […]
iEarth is currently establishing the new-to-me format of “teaching conversations”, where two or more people meet to discuss specific aspects of one person’s teaching in a “critical friend” setting. Obviously I volunteered to be grilled, and despite me trying to suggest other topics, too (like the active lunch break and the “nerd topic” intro in a […]
I often teach faculty development workshops at Kiel University. Since we have been in remote teaching mode almost exclusively since March 2020, dealing with virtual classes is a pressing subject – both for the faculty who attend my workshops, but also for myself as I have to present best practice examples of leading fully-virtual all-day […]
In a workshop I led recently, a participant helped me gain a new perspective on an old method: the “lightning storm in the chat” (my best attempt at translating “Chatgewitter” to English. No idea what the name of the method is in English). The idea is simple: You ask a question, people type their responses […]
I have always hated workshops where you had to do “active stuff”, moving around to music and the like, because the facilitator wanted to “get everybody active!”. But recently I’ve come to appreciate the value in that (better late than never, right?). So what I occasionally do these days, sometimes after a break or when […]
I am currently teaching a lot of workshops on higher education topics where participants (who previously didn’t know each other, or me) spend 1-1.5 days talking about topics that can feel emotional and intimate and where I want to create an environment that is open and full of trust, and where connections form that last […]
Last week I gave a workshop on “taking ownership of your own mentoring” at Kiel University again (link to the pptx slides in case you want to give a similar workshop yourself). This is one of my favourite topics to talk about (especially in combination with how to use social media for that purpose; and […]
For many people it has been (and still is!) a huge hassle to quickly figure out ways to teach field courses in a covid-19 world, and I can relate so much! But I’m also getting more and more excited about the possibilities that are opening up when we think about fieldwork in a new way. […]
I am completely in love with my new tablet. I love drawing on it and even though the results are not quite up to my standards yet, I am too excited to not share. So here I drew what (I think) you need to know about instructional videos, in a nutshell: They should be short! […]
I’m currently preparing a couple of workshops on higher education topics, and of course it is always important to talk about learning outcomes. I had a faint memory of having developed some materials (when still working at ZLL together with one of my all time favourite colleagues, Timo Lüth) to help instructors work with the […]
My friend’s university recently decided that “excursion week” (a week in May during which there are no lectures or exercises or anything happening at university to make time for field courses during the semester) is cancelled this year. Which is, of course, not surprising given the current situation, but it isn’t cancelled as in “go […]
This is the blog version of our iPoster for the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting. “Our” means the fun team consisting of Torge Martin, myself, Elin Darelius, Yasmin Appelhans — my #KitchenOceanography and science communication buddies! :-) Torge is presenting the poster in San Diego today, but since none of us others could be there (and maybe […]
Kjersti, Steffi, Elin and I recently discussed ways to better integrate the GEOF105 student cruise into the course. Right now, even though students write a report about their work on the student cruise, it’s pretty much a one-off event with little connection to what happens before and after, which is a pity. Having a whole research […]
Guest posts, take-overs and interviews are a great alternative to maintaining social media channels for every scientist / project / institution individually, if that isn’t what you want to be doing (or — as in my case — a great addition) As I am preparing a workshop on online science communication, I have been thinking […]
I’m actually at a loss for words. Amazing? Spectacular? So much fun? All of that! Today was the first time Torge and I tried our four DIYnamics-inspired rotating tables in teaching. (Remember? We want to use 4 rotating tables simultaneously so students can work in small groups rather than watching us present experiments, and also […]
My friend Pierré and I started working on this article when both of us were still working at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen. It took forever to get published, mainly because both of us had moved on to different jobs with other foci, so maybe it’s not a big deal that it took me over […]
While student cruises usually have a lot of desired learning outcomes related to being able to use oceanographic instrumentation and knowledge of regional oceanography, ultimately one of their purposes is to equip students to function well as sea-going oceanographers, should they choose to take that direction. So in my opinion, it is very important that […]
This week I had the honor to be invited to give a talk to a network of PhD students of the three Leibniz institutes in Kiel, which is just forming. Being as big a fan of networking as I am, of course I could not say no to this opportunity, especially since I had a […]
I’d love your input: If your student lab for GFD tank experiments had to downsize, but you had to present a “wish list” for a smaller replacement, what would be on that list? Below are my considerations, but I would be super grateful for any additional input or comments! :-) Background and “boundary conditions” The […]
I’ve been recommending the “Continue. Start. Stop.” feedback method for years an years (at least since my 2013 blog post), but not as a research-backed method but mostly based on my positive personal experience with it. I have used this method to get feedback on courses I’ve been teaching a couple of weeks into the […]
Have you ever had questions related to your career development that you didn’t know who to ask for answers for? Or have you ever felt that you would probably profit from having a mentor, but didn’t know who that mentor could be? Or do you have a great mentor but wonder whether you might be […]
Using technology to enable active engagement with content in a large lecture. In 2014, I presented the paper “Enabling backchannel communication between a lecturer and a large group” at the SEFI conference in Birmingham. That paper is based on work that I have done with two colleagues – the instructor of a large lecture, and the […]
This text was written for GeoEd, the education column of EGU’s blog, and first appeared there on Nov 27th, 2015. — In my second year studying physical oceanography, I got a student job in an ocean modelling group. When I excitedly told my friends and family about said job, most of them did not have the slightest […]
Part 1 and 2 of this post were first posted on the EGU’s blog on Jan 29, 2016, and Feb 29, 2016, respectively. Part 1 gives four steps to outreach activities, part 2 uses an example to further illustrate those four steps. Part 1: For the best hands-on outreach experiences, just provide opportunities for playing! […]
Mirjam S. Glessmer & Pierré D. de Wet Abstract Even though experiments – whether demonstrated to, or personally performed by students – have been part of training in STEM for a long time, their effectiveness as an educational tool are sometimes questioned. For, despite students’ ability to produce correct answers to standard questions regarding these […]
Nicole Podleschny & Mirjam Glessmer, 2015 In our recent workshop on “supporting self-organized learning with online media”, Nicole Podleschny and I came up with a morphological box to help plan online teaching units. The morphological box is basically a list of criteria that we thought might be relevant, and then we suggest different values for each of the criteria […]
This post was first published at the EGU’s blog’s “educational corner” GeoEd, in March 2016 (link here). — Sometimes we look for new ways to engage our students or the general public in discussions about our science. Today I would like to suggest we use art! Someone recently told me about her work on “STEAM”, […]
Explore how melting of ice cubes floating in water is influenced by the salinity of the water. Important oceanographic concepts like density and density driven currents are visualized and can be discussed on the basis of this experiment. Context Audience This hands-on experiment is suited for many different audiences and can be used to achieve a wealth […]
— This post was written for “Teaching in the Academy” in Israel, where it was published in Hebrew! Link here. — Many times students fail to see the real-life relevance of what they are supposed to be learning at university. But there is an easy way to help them make the connection: Ask them to take […]
Are you hesitant to do outreach because you don’t really know how to convey your message to an audience that isn’t as fascinated by your field as you are and doesn’t have at least some background knowledge? Then here is a tool that will help you make your science meaningful and accessible to any audience! First: There is a need for […]
When we think about reflections in water, we usually think of calm lakes and trees on the shore opposite to us. Or clouds. Or at least that’s what I think of: Everything is so far away, that it seems to be reflected at an axis that is a horizontal line far away from us. Then the […]
How you can bring students into the right mindset and get them curious about your topic before your class even starts. Do you remember the awkward feeling when you sit in class a couple of minutes before class starts, the instructor is nervously shuffling some papers, students fill the room but there is an awkward silence […]
“Ask your students to take a picture to help them connect theoretical lecture content to the reality of their everyday life”! This is the title of a post I wrote for an issue on current technologies and their integration into teaching of the journal “Teaching in the Academy” that is being distributed to everybody who […]
This is a method that I have been excited about ever since learning about #birdclass in the “Evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching” MOOC last year: Help students discover that the content of your class is not restricted to your class, but actually occurs everywhere! All the time! In their own lives! The idea is that students take […]
Sometimes we really want our students to practice presenting posters, but we can’t afford printing all those nice A0-posters for everybody in our large class, or we don’t want them spending time on design but focus on content, or both. What then? Well, instead of having them design A0 posters, just give them a template […]
One of the arguments against offering students practice opportunities online and providing automated feedback right then and there is that that way, they will never learn to work independently. Since I am working on e-assessment a lot and with many different courses at the moment, this is a fear that I definitely need to take seriously. I don’t believe […]
I’m very excited to announce that I, together with Christian Seifert, have been awarded a Tandem Fellowship by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft. Christian, among other things, teaches undergraduate mathematics for engineers, and together we have developed a concept to improve instruction, which we now get support to implement. The problem that we are addressing is that mathematics […]
My colleague Caroline and I recently ran a training course for student tutors and we started it out with the Marshmallow Challenge, that Siska had suggested, both as an ice breaker, team building task and to have participants gain experiences together that we could refer to later on during the workshop. So, Marshmallow Challenge. Except […]
In my last post, I talked about a model for stages of group development. Today I want to talk about how you can use this model when you are trying to make a group work together well. First, it is important to recognize that every team will go through most of the phases. Except for the […]
Last week we talked about motivation quite a bit: First about why do students engage in academic tasks?, then about how motivation is proportional to the expectation of achieving a goal. Today I want to bring it all together a bit more, by presenting two other theories (both also described in the Torres-Ayala and Herman […]
For a course we recently needed to come up with guidelines for feedback on work products. This is what I suggested. Discuss! ;-) When giving feedback, there are a few pointers that help making it easier for you to give and for the other person to receive feedback: Use the sandwich-principle: Start and end […]
My awesome colleague Marisa ran another workshop on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in which I was lucky enough to assist. For the last workshop for people who are planning to use PBL in their teaching, we used the solar eclipse to build a case around. Since this time we weren’t as lucky to have a solar eclipse happening on […]
How can we make sure students actually prepare for the next session? This post is a work-in-progress – I am working on flipping my first ever class, and this is a collection of my thoughts on the matter which I thought might be interesting to others, too. But I will definitely come back to the […]
Or: Think first about what you want students to be able to do, then about what they need to learn in order to do it. One term that I’ve noticed I am referring to in blog posts without ever having actually talked about what I mean by it is “constructive alignment”. It is the most fundamental idea underlying my […]
Can we become “too motivating”? One thing I’ve been pondering recently are vicious circles, especially in teaching and learning contexts. Imagine this situation: You observe that your students are not as active as you would like them to be. Hence you change something in your teaching to make them become more active: You act more […]
PBL – the final steps. Two weeks ago, I described the first five steps of the problem-based learning (PBL) method. Last week, we continued with the workshop and went through the final steps. Step 6, the research phase, was completed over the week between the two workshops: Everybody worked on questions related to observing the […]
Workshop on PBL, using the upcoming solar eclipse (on Friday!) as a case study. I am currently attending a workshop run by one of my all-time favorite colleagues, Marisa, on Problem-Based Learning. The workshop is aimed at people who want to use PBL in their teaching, and is split into three sessions. By pure dumb luck I realized […]
How do you deal with experiments that you would loooove to run in your course but just can’t? We are currently working on a guide to instructing lab experiments. A colleague is writing on a piece on thought experiments, one of which I found super interesting. Thought experiments are quite common in philosophy. Think, for […]
On different approaches to peer-instruction and why one might want to use them. Having sat in many different lectures by many different professors over the last year, and having given feedback on the methods used in most of those lectures, I find myself wondering how we can define a standard or even best practice for […]
…because there are always classes starting somewhere or other… Ever wondered what a good practice for your first day of class might be? I started talking about this with colleagues prompted by a video on the coursera course on evidence-based undergraduate #STEMTeaching (which, btw, I recommend you put on your watch-list and take it as soon […]
Getting feedback on what was least clear in a course session. A classroom assessment technique that I like a lot is “the muddiest point”. It is very simple: At the end of a course unit, you hand out small pieces of papers and ask students to write down the single most confusing point (or the […]
A method to get all students engaged in solving problem sets. A very common problem during problem-set solving sessions is that instead of all students being actively involved in the exercise, in each group there is one student working on the problem set, while the rest of the group is watching, paying more or (more […]
Because I am getting sick of stratifications not working out the way I planned them. Creating stratifications, especially continuous stratifications, is a pain. Since I wanted a nice stratification for an experiment recently, I finally decided to do a literature search on how the professionals create their stratifications. And the one method that was mentioned over […]
How do you get students to get to know each other quickly while getting to know them yourself at the same time? The new school year is almost upon us and we are facing new students soon. For many kinds of classes, there is a huge benefit from students knowing each other well, and from […]
Updated movie following Arne’s advice. When I asked for feedback on the rainbow movies the other day, Arne had a pretty good idea for how one of the explanations could be made more intuitive. I have other people’s comments still in the queue and I’m working on them, this is still very much in the […]
Multiple choice questions at different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Let’s assume you are convinced that using ABCD-cards or clickers in your teaching is a good idea. But now you want to tailor your questions such as to specifically test for example knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis or evaluation; the six educational goals described in Bloom’s taxonomy. How do you […]
How can you classify different levels of skills you want your students to gain from your classes? Learning objectives are traditionally categorized after Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy. Bloom separates learning objectives in three classes: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Cognitive learning objectives are about what people know, understand and about their thinking processes dealing with and synthesizing that knowledge. […]
Taking the same graphics as in this post, but presenting them differently. In the previous post, I presented a screen cast explaining, in a very text-booky way, how rainbows form. Today, I am using the same graphics, but I have broken the movie into six individual snippets. I’m starting out from the schematic that concluded last […]
Why is a rainbow always red on top and blue at the bottom? We always talk about prisms and refraction and stuff, but be honest – would you be able to explain the order of colors in a rainbow without pausing and thinking first? As I said the other day, I am currently experimenting with screen […]
Trying to figure out a technique that works for me. I recently talked to a professor at my university who is toying with the idea of making teaching videos. As a reader of my blog you know the kind of videos I usually show here: Pretty much un-edited movies of some kind of experiment. No voice-overs, […]
When feedback is more confusing than helpful. The other day I came across a blog post on Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. on responding to student writing/writers by P. T. Corrigan. And one point of that post struck home, and that point is on contradictory teacher feedback. When I am asked to provide feedback on my […]
At my new job the quality management team regularly offers workshops that the whole team attends. One detail has repeatedly come up and I want to present it here, too. It is a new-to-me method to ask for specific feedback: The five finger method. For each finger of the hand, a specific question needs to be addressed. […]
Remember my ABCD voting cards? Here is how the professionals do audience response. Remember my post on ABCD voting cards (post 1, 2, 3 on the topic)? I then introduced them as “low tech clickers”. Having never worked with actual clickers then, I really really liked the method. And I still think it’s a neat […]
A couple of pointers on how to use concept maps in class. I recently presented concept maps as a tool both here and in a workshop I co-taught. And I was pleasantly surprised by how many people said that they were considering employing this tool in their class! So for those of you who might […]
Drawing concept maps at the beginning, the middle and the end of the course. Using concept maps in teaching is something that I first tried last year in both the GEOF130 and CMM31 courses. The idea is that coming in, students typically don’t have a very good overview over the topics and concepts that are […]
My experience with an examination via Skype. In 2012, I taught two lectures via Skype at the University Centre of the Westfjords, while actually physically sitting in Norway. That experience is described in this post. When writing that post, I remembered that I also have experience in doing examinations via Skype. Except that experience was as […]
Drawing by hand on the board in real time rather than projecting a finished schematic? It is funny. During my undergrad, LCD projectors were just starting to arrive at the university. Many of the classes I attended during my first years used overhead projectors and hand-written slides, or sometimes printed slides if someone wanted to […]
Have students group in pairs, develop and answer questions. It is really hard to come up with exam questions (or even just practice questions) that have the right level of difficulty so that students feel challenged, but confident that they will be able to solve the questions. One way to develop those questions is to not […]
Early online release of a paper on “Using Scientific Meetings to Enhance the Development of Early Career Scientists” by Urban and Boscolo. Even though it has apparently been online for quite a while, I was only just recently made aware that the paper “Using Scientific Meetings to Enhance the Development of Early Career Scientists” by Ed R. […]
My experiences with giving a lecture via Skype. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I taught two lectures at the University Centre of the Westfjords, Iceland, in 2012 while physically being in Norway. How did that work out? Teaching via Skype is a great option for when travel is not in the cards, be it […]
What contexts can the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and in salt water” experiment be used in? As you might have noticed, I really like the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and in salt water” experiment. Initially, I had only three posts planned on the topic (post 1 and 2 showing different variation […]
How do you introduce voting cards as a new method in a way that minimizes student resistance? As all new methods, voting cards (see post on the method here, and on what kind of questions to ask here) first seem scary. After all, students don’t know what will happen if they happen to chose the wrong […]
Different didactical settings in which the “ice cubes melting in fresh and salt water” experiment can be used. In part 1 and 2 of this series, I showed two different ways of using the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water” experiment in lectures. Today I want to back up a little bit […]
Different ways of posing questions for concept tests are being presented here Concept tests using voting cards have been presented in this post. Here, I want to talk about different types of questions that one could imagine using for this method. 1) Classical multiple choice In the classical multiple choice version, for each question four […]
Voting cards. A low-tech concept test tool, enhancing student engagement and participation. (Post 1/3) Voting cards are a tool that I learned about from Al Trujillo at the workshop “teaching oceanography” in San Francisco in 2013. Basically, voting cards are a low-tech clicker version: A sheet of paper is divided into four quarters, each quarter […]
