The jigsaw method (with editable files to organise it)
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…
Category: method
Database of Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion
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!…
Recap of the first meeting of my new course “Teaching for Sustainability”
Yesterday was the first meeting of this spring’s installment of my “teaching for sustainability” course and it is so inspiring and energizing to meet so many motivated and engaged teachers!…
Playing with Microsoft Reflect, “a well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”
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…
Structuring fieldwork as a jigsaw to increase student responsibility in, and ownership of, their projects
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…
iEarth GeoLearning Forum 2023 Bingo
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…
How to create an Activity Bingo for teaching purposes
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…
How can we adapt a teaching method for our purposes? The “Doughnut rounds” example
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…
Another serious game for teaching sustainability that I like: the Climate Fresk
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…
UDL bingo: challenge yourself!
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,…
I can now facilitate the “Biodiversity Collage”!
I’m now an official trained facilitator of the Biodiversity Collage (that I wrote about here)!
Teaching about a deep approach and surface approach to learning
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…
Automated subtitles in pptx presentations are so easy and super good! How did I not know about this before?
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…
“The Biodiversity Collage” — a fun and collaborative workshop to explore the biodiversity crisis, but leave hopeful and ready to tackle the challenge
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…
When talking about our negative experiences, it’s good to use the third person
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…
“Doughnut Rounds” (after Fleiszer et al., 1997)
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…
Designing postcards to inspire discussion about co-creation methods
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…
A quick introduction to Cooperative Learning (summarizing Anja Møgelvang’s workshop)
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…
Choosing technical terminology that does not make people feel excluded or uncomfortable
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,…
How local field laboratories can enhance student learning – first thoughts
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…
How much of the work should the teacher vs the student do? Teaching as a dance, inspired by Joe Hoyle
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…
Funded: Our project on “co-creation to promote active learning and communities of practice”
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,…
Using rubrics
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…
Small groups work on shared artefacts
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…
Including missing topics that students suggest
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…
Guest post by Kjersti Daae: Using voting cards to increase student activity and promote discussions and critical thinking
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…
Letting students choose the format of their assessment
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…
Learning together across courses — our iSSOTL presentation
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…
#Methods2Go: Methods for feedback and reflection in university teaching
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…
#Methods2Go: Transferring theoretical ideas into actionable knowledge in university teaching
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…
Giving students choice on what is being discussed in class
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,…
#Methods2Go: Methods for “informing” students in university classes
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…
CHESS/iEarth joint course on “communication skills in outreach and teaching”
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…
Where do you see this in your own life? Asking students to suggest examples
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…
#Methods2Go: Methods for assessing previous knowledge in university classes
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…
#Methods2Go: Methods for “arriving” in class, i.e. getting to know people & raising interest
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…
“Things I wanted to say but didn’t get the chance…”: A method to include missing voices!
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…
#Methods2Go: methods to end lessons with in university teaching
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…
Using student representatives to improve communication with your class
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…
Our presentation at #FieldWorkFix: “An interactive mobile adventure on coastal protection”
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…
#Methods2Go: Methods to secure results in university teaching
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…
#Methods2Go: methods to facilitate knowledge application in university teaching
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…
#Methods2Go: methods to facilitate discussion in university teaching
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…
#Methods2Go: university teaching methods for acquring knowledge
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…
#Methods2Go: Ideas for starting off your university classes (inspired by EM Schumacher’s work)
“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…
Teaching inspiration dispenser
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…
Negotiating a rubric of learning outcomes and letting students pick the format in which they show they’ve mastered the learning outcomes
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…
Pick a role and write a lecture summary from that perspective. Does that sound motivating?
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…
A personal story about why I am reluctant to start a class with an intervention
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…
An iEarth teaching conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå on #WaveWatching
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…
Using an active lunch break to see the world through our subject area’s lens and to reconnect us to what fascinates and motivates us
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…
The “lightning storm in the chat” method
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”…
My two favourite methods for re-activating and re-focussing workshop participants
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…
Asking for the “nerd topic” when introducing workshop participants to each other to foster self-disclosure to create community
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…
A workshop on building and maintaining a mentoring network in academia
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…
Teaching field courses in a virtual setting
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…
Instructional videos in a nutshell
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…
Asking questions that aim at specific levels of the modified Bloom’s taxonomy
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…
“Excursion week” in Oceanography 101 while physically distancing
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…
Telling ocean science stories on social media
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…
New #WaveWatching series happening over on Elin’s blog: #BergenWaveWatching!
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…
Guest posts, take-overs, interviews, and why I love them
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…
If one rotating table is awesome, four rotating tables are…?
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…
Supporting conceptual understanding of the Coriolis force through laboratory experiments
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…
What’s the etiquette on a research ship? “Soft skill” learning outcomes on a student cruise
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…
Of timeless relevance: the ESWN mentoring map and how you can provide mentoring to others at any career stage
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.…
Need your help! “Wish list” for a student lab for tank experiments?
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…
“Continue. Start. Stop.”. An article supporting the usefulness of my favourite method of asking for student feedback on a course!
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…
Taking ownership of your own mentoring
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…
Enabling backchannel communication between a lecturer and a large group
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…
Outreach activity: How do we make climate predictions?
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…
Four steps to great hands-on outreach experiences
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…
Experiment: Demystifying the Coriolis force
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 tool for planning online teaching units
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…
Using art in your science teaching and outreach. The why and the how.
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…
Experiment: Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water
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…
Asking students to take pictures to help them connect theory to the reality of their everyday lives
— 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…
How to make your science meaningful and accessible to any audience
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…
Reflections on reflections
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…
How you can bring students into the right mindset and get them curious about your topic before your class even starts.
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…
Ask your students to take a picture to help them connect theoretical lecture content to the reality of their everyday life
“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…
Using a morphological box to plan online teaching
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 the teaching units. You can find it…
Using twitter as a tool to let students discover that the topics of their courses are EVERYWHERE
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…
Student poster presentations: the cheap and easy way
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…
Will giving your students more structure make them need more structure?
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…
Bridging the gap between conventional mathematics teaching and the topics that engineering students are really interested in
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,…
The Marshmallow Challenge
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…
How to support group processes as a tutor
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…
And even more on motivation
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…
Giving – and receiving – helpful feedback
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…
Oceanography PBL workshop and case
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…
Flipping the classroom
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…
Constructive alignment
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…
Activating students – a vicious circle?
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…
Problem-based learning: Solar eclipse, part II
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…
Problem-Based Learning: Solar eclipse
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…
Thought experiments
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…
On grading strategies.
How do you deal with grading to make it less painful? Talking to a friend who had to grade a lot of exams recently I mentioned a post I had…
What do I want from my students – sense-making or answer-making?
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…
First day of class
…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…
Asking students to tell us about “the muddiest point”
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…
Using the “jigsaw” method for practicing solving problem-sets
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…
Creating a continuous stratification in a tank, using the double bucket filling method
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…
First day of class – student introductions.
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…
Rainbows III
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…
How to ask multiple-choice questions when specifically wanting to test knowledge, comprehension or application
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…
Classifying educational goals using Bloom’s taxonomy
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…
Rainbows and refraction II
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.…
Rainbows and refraction
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…
Teaching videos
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…
Giving feedback on student writing
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.…
Five finger feedback
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…
Clickers
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…
Concept maps II
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 …
Concept maps
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…
Examinations via Skype.
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…
On drawing on the board by hand in real time
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…
Using Scientific Meetings to Enhance the Development of Early Career Scientists
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…
Long-distance teaching.
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…
Melting ice cubes – what contexts to use this experiment in (post 4/4)
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…
Introducing voting cards (post 3/3)
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…
Melting ice cubes – one experiment, many ways (post 3/4)
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…
How to pose questions for voting card concept tests (post 2/3)
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…
A, B, C or D?
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…