Category Archives: method

#Methods2Go: methods to facilitate knowledge application in university teaching

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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 somewhere where they would encounter this in their everyday lives, and write it on the other side.

This very basic idea of matching some theoretical construct with its concrete, experience-able manifestation is so useful and something we forget too often!

My favourite example: Hydraulic jumps! Sound horriby theoretical until you start discovering them everywhere: In rivers, you sink when doing the dishes, when washing the car…

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to secure results”.

What other methods do you like to fascilitate application of knowledge?

#Methods2Go: methods to facilitate discussion in university teaching

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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”, who then asks those questions for everybody else. This lowers the threshold of asking questions, because they become anonymous and nobody has to worry about potentially looking stupid.

On the other hand, students also don’t practice speaking up and asking questions, so it might be good to have an exit plan for this method; i.e. only use this method for the first couple of lectures until students have gotten confident with asking questions in that format and have gained confidence that they won’t be ridiculed for their questions. As a next step, you could then do something like think-pair-share (where students still have the lower threshold of not asking questions in front of a large group, and but practice first in the pair, and then when someone speaks for the pair, they are at least not only speaking for themselves. And once students have gotten good at asking questions that way, maybe they are ready to just ask questions without any extra method, only maybe a little encouragement from the teacher’s side.

Silent discussion

This method I thought was funny: A question or statement is written on a poster and students add their comments in writing, without speaking. That’s basically what we’ve been doing for the last year and a half with discussion forums online! But what’s interesting is that what people love to hate online actually might not be all bad. There are clear advantages of occasionally writing things down instead of always communicating verbally: shy students might get the opportunity to participate more easily, thoughts are documented and can be referred to more easily no matter what other thoughts were brought up later, a documentation of the whole discussion is easily available. So enjoy this positive spin on discussion forums! :)

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to apply knowledge”.

What other methods do you like to facilitate discussion?

#Methods2Go: university teaching methods for acquring knowledge

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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 the task, they (non-verbally!) signal to the teacher, who then pairs them up with someone from the other group who has finished their task, too. The two of them then explain to each other what they just read/learned/did.

I really like the idea behind this method that different learning tempos are taken care of so that fast students don’t just sit and wait for everybody else to finish. But this could potentially increase pre-existing inequalities when the “strongest” students get paired up first, and then pairs get “weaker” over time (obviously, speed is not the best indicator of “strength”, they might also be less careful). But still, it might appear to students that there is a hierarchy implied if attention is drawn to how fast they finish a task.

Also I wonder how much disturbance is introduced in the classroom when students have to physically relocate to form the new pairs, and then start discussing. So I am wondering if this method wouldn’t work much better online, when you initially have two breakout rooms (or even just assign two different tasks to everybody in your main room) and when students DM the instructor that they have finished the task, they are sent into breakout rooms with a partner who worked on the other task. As an instructor, you would need to coordinate this carefully, but I can see that working well without too much of a disruption to people still working on the initial task, and also without drawing a lot of attention to how fast someone is working.

Sandwich

I had heard of the sandwich method to give feedback (not a fan — I very much prefer the continue-start-stop method!), but wasn’t aware of this method of the same name!

For this sandwich, the teacher presents a task and asks students to think about how that task could be solved. Student suggestions for what methods could be used or how one would start working on the task are collected. This is the bottom bun, the base of the sandwich.

The teacher then explains whatever they think needs to be explained in order to solve the task: theories, methods, ways to calculate certain things, … This is the salad, cheese or whatever other interesting stuff inside the sandwich.

Students then use this to actually do the task: this is the top of the sandwich.

What I like about this method is the suggestion of explicitly giving students room to brainstorm and discuss ways to approach and solve a task before students start working on it; making sure that everybody has the necessary background information and clues to start working on it, rather than discussing all of this after students were supposed to have solved it (when some students are demotivated already because they couldn’t do it, and others don’t need that discussion any more because they had already successfully done it).

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to discuss content”.

What other methods do you like for fascilitating knowledge acquisition?

#Methods2Go: Ideas for starting off your university classes (inspired by EM Schumacher’s work)

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“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 of colourful flashcards that are loosely bound together, with a short description of a method on either side. I love the format — it’s playful and great to browse for inspiration; flipping through the cards is fun!

I recently re-discovered my copy and want to share a couple of the methods with you: the ones that sparked images in my head right away. But check out the method pool on the constructif website (in German, but many of the methods have english titles so you can either guess or google them) for a more comprehensive overview!

Today: methods to start off your lessons

Awaking interest

One idea to start off your lessons is to find something that sparks student interest in the topic you want to discuss. You could for example use quotes, snippets from movies, or provocative statements. These work especially well when students have an easy way to relate to them, for example because they are related to things that are relevant in their own lives or to their future in the profession.

Examples that come to mind:

1. A really fun question like Kjersti‘s below: How can you cool down a beer most efficiently when you are outdoors? Isn’t this intriguing even when you have no idea what the lecture is about?

Multiple choice question by Kjersti Daae, used with permission

This can be used as a multiple choice question at the beginning of the class, or just shown then and only picked up again at the end of the class, hopefully inspiring the students to pay attention in order to figure out the answer along the way.

2. Fun memes. I remember starting classes on ocean salinity with one showing a shark and saying something like “Did you know? The ocean is salty because of the tears of misunderstood sharks that just want to play” (tried to find the original source, but there are so many variations of this out there that I couldn’t be sure). Even though it’s probably obvious that this is not the answer we are going for, it still raises the question “why is the ocean salty” in a fun and playful way.

3. Interesting applications. I used to have a picture of a car with its heavy load poking through the front windscreen — it had clearly not been secured properly when the driver suddenly had to brake. Inertia can really be tricky… What’s great about such a picture is that it makes the relevance of an otherwise quite abstract and hard to imagine concept absolutely obvious.

I like having questions and pictures like these up on the screen while students enter the (virtual) room to get them thinking about the upcoming session. If you are really ambitious (in a good way!) you could also rotate through a slide deck with several types of prompts for thought/discussion…

Fast networking

Students interview each other on the topic of the upcoming lesson (maybe there could be an overall question or prompt that they are trying to find information for?) and visualise the results. This activates prior knowledge and, through the visualization bit, also puts different snippets of knowledge into relation with each other.

What’s different from “talk to your neighbour about this for a minute”? The clear roles of interviewer/interviewee facilitate a conversation more easily, especially with students that don’t know each other well and/or are shy.

Living statistics (sometimes also called sociometry)

This is a method that I have used a lot but had forgotten about now that things have been online for me in what feels like forever: asking questions and assigning spaces in the room for different answer options, and have students move around the room to answer them. This method is great when facilitating students getting to know each other, e.g. asking them to place themselves on an imaginary map of where they were born (without too clearly prescribing what is where, so that students need to talk to each other to figure out where to place themselves relative to each other), how much prior knowledge they have, what fields they come from in interdisciplinary courses, … It’s usually easier to remember who stood close by in response to a certain question than to remember everybody that had put their hand up, and especially in large classes where students don’t know each other yet, that is really helpful!

Place mat

For the “place mat” method, three or four students sit around a table together and simultaneously write their thoughts on a given question on a large sheet of paper, each in their own corner. After a while they then compile their thoughts into common notes in the middle of the piece of paper. Those common thoughts are then later shared with the whole group.

I really like this method because I am a big fan of note-taking, both to facilitate individual thinking as well as in group discussions. When I teach virtually, I often use a shared google slides document, in which each group is taking notes on their own slide. This is great for several reasons: a) students take notes so no ideas get lost between when they talk about it and later present it to the large group, b) I can “spy” on the groups’ progress and adjust the length of breakout sessions without interrupting groups by popping in on them, c) I get an idea of what they are discussing and can prepare a strategy for how I want to bring the points from different groups up in the following discussion with the whole group.

That’s it for today! We’ll continue next #TeachingTuesday with “methods to acquire knowledge”!

What other methods do you like for active starts of your lessons?

Teaching inspiration dispenser

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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 can be charged with new ideas

  • from every teaching workshop that happens (we’d just ask people to write minute papers at the end with their best teaching tip; either one of their own, something they heard about, or the best idea they got during the workshop),
  • from what students wish teachers thought of,
  • from what the Centre for Teaching and Learning thinks is good advice or inspiring to think about,
  • from what visiting scientists share,
  • from what we read or hear about,
  • …

All we need is a really short text (maybe with the author’s name and date, to make it more personal and relatable?), and then there need to be a couple of dozen of those in storage, so people are not likely to get the same one too often if they are repeat customers.

I think something like that would be awesome to

  • just share interesting ideas (“Mmh, I wonder if I should try…”),
  • generate conversation (“Guess what the teaching inspiration dispenser told me this morning?”),
  • be a collectible item that people put on their pin boards above their desks or maybe even swap or pass on to someone else who they think might benefit from the idea,
  • represent artefacts of collective learning as the database behind it grows.

There is of course also the much more boring low-tech version (much less appealing that pressing a button and seeing paper coming out!) where we just have a big bowl of folded pieces of paper where people pick one. We could colour-code the paper, e.g. the light green spring edition of newly added pieces of paper, or the red ones are for large classes. People could also easily put in their own pieces if they wanted to contribute; that way it’s not moderated and thus more democratic. So maybe it’s an equally good or even better option?

I’m the kind of person who would really love getting the physical piece of paper, sticking it in my bag, finding it weeks later and being reminded of the thing I wanted to try in my teaching. Even though I get so much inspiration and so many ideas from social media, podcasts, blog posts, books — just having a small piece of paper with an interesting thought would really appeal to me. A bit like a fortune cookie, except with some useful advice and minus the cookie (not a fan, but YMMV. Maybe the teaching inspiration cookie would be something for you?).

What do you think? Would you enjoy getting teaching inspiration that way? Would you want the automated dispenser or would you prefer to pick from a bowl?

Negotiating a rubric of learning outcomes and letting students pick the format in which they show they’ve mastered the learning outcomes

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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 stuck with me — sometimes the teacher and the students just have “to play the game”. Assessment is something that needs to happen, and there are certain rules around it that need to be followed, but there are also a lot of things that can be negotiated to come to a consensus that works for everybody. So, as a teacher, just be open about your role in the game and the rules you yourself are bound by and the ones you are open to negotiate, and then start discussing! Anyway, the combination of those three inputs gave me an idea that I would like your feedback on.

Consider you want to teach a certain topic. Traditionally you would ask students to do a certain activity. You have specific learning outcomes you want your students to reach. Whether or not they reach those outcomes, you would evaluate by asking a certain set of questions to see whether they answer them correctly, or maybe by asking them to produce an artefact like an essay or a lab report. And that would be it.

But now consider you tell students that there is this specific topic you want to teach (and why you want to teach it, how it relates to the bigger picture of the discipline and what makes it relevant. Or you could even ask them to figure that out themselves!) and that they will be free to produce any kind of artefact or performance they want for the assessment. Now you could share your learning outcomes and tell them about what learning outcomes matter most to you, and why. And then you could start discussing. Do students agree on the relative importance of learning outcomes that you show in the way you are weighing them? Are there other learning outcomes that they see as relevant that you did not include (yet)?

Once that is settled (possibly by voting, or maybe also coming to a consensus in a discussion, depending on your group and your relationship to them. And of course you can set the boundary conditions that maybe some learning outcomes need to count for at least, or not more, a certain threshold), you are ready for the next important discussion. How could students show that they have mastered a learning outcome? What kind of evidence would they have to produce? What might count as having met the outcome, what would still count as “good enough”?

Now that it’s clear what the learning outcomes are and what they mean in terms of specific skills that will need to be demonstrated, you could let students add one learning outcome that they define themselves and that is related to the format of the artefact that they want to produce (possibly public speaking with confidence when presenting the product, learning to use some software to visualise, or analysing a different dataset than you gave them themselves, …). You could have already included 10% (or however much you think that skill should “be worth”) in the rubric, or negotiate it with students.

While negotiating learning outcomes, students will already have needed to think about how each learning outcome will become visible with their chosen way of presentation, and this should be talked through with you beforehand and/or documented in a meta document, so that a very artistic presentation does not obscure that actual learning has taken place.

How much fun would it be when people can choose to give a talk, do a short video, present a poster, design an infographic, rhyme a science poem, or whatever else they might like? I imagine it would be super motivating. Plus it would help students build a portfolio that shows their subject-specific skills acquired in our class alongside other skills that they think are fun or important to develop. And maybe some artefacts could be used in science communication, engaging other people by hooking them via a format they are interested in, and then maybe they also get interested in the content? I’ve seen hugely creative ideas when we asked students to write blog posts about phenomena we had investigated in the rotating DIYnamics tanks, like a Romeo-and-Juliet-type short novel on two water drops, or an amazing comic — and there they were confined to writing. What if they could also choose to make objects like my pocket wave watching guide, or to perform a play?

I guess it could be overwhelming when the content is very difficult, the task is very big, and students then also have to consider how to show that they learned it, in a way that isn’t pre-determined. Also timing might be important here so this task does not happen at the same time as other deadlines or exams. And obviously when you suggest this to your students, they might still all want to pick the same, or at least a traditional, format, and you would have to be ok with this if you take them seriously in these negotiations. What do you think? What should we consider and look out for when trying to implement something like this?

Pick a role and write a lecture summary from that perspective. Does that sound motivating?

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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 students can use to study for the exam. I did that when I was teaching the “introduction to oceanography” 10 years ago and liked it (also great feedback for me on what students thought was important!), but in the end it is just one more thing we are “asking” the students to do, so is it really such a good idea?

Then on my lunchtime walk today, I listened to “lecture breakers” episode 78. Great episode as always! Early in the podcast several design criteria are mentioned, for example for intrinsic motivation it’s important to give students choice and show the relevance of what they are doing to their real life (more on the self-determination theory here), and that from an equity perspective, it’s important to provide different perspectives on a topic. Those stuck with me, and then one piece of advice was given: to let students adopt roles. Generic roles like a facilitator, researcher, devils advocate; or roles that are specific to the topic of discussion. They did not really elaborate on it very much, but what happened in my head is this: What if we combined our summaries with the idea of students choosing roles?

There are so many stakeholders in science, and students might have preferred approaches or might want to try on potential future roles. For example, someone could choose to take on the role of a minutes keeper and write a classical summary of the main points of a lecture. That would be all I asked my students to do back in the day, so not super exciting, but maybe it is what someone would choose? Or someone might choose to be a science journalist that does not only document the main points, but additionally finds a hook for why a reader should care, so for example relating it to recent local events. Or someone could pick the role of devil’s advocate and summarise the main points but also try to find any gaps or inconsistencies in the story line. Or someone might want to be a teacher and not only summarise the main points, but also find a way to teach them better than the lecturer did (or possibly to a different audience). Or someone might want to be a curator and combine the key points of the lecture with other supporting resources. Or an artist, or a travel guide, …? Or, of course, there are specific roles depending on the topic: A fisherman? Someone living in a region affected by some event? A policy maker? A concerned citizen?

Choosing such a role might give students permission to get creative. A summary does not necessarily be a written piece, it could also be a short podcast or a piece of art, if they so choose. That would definitely make it a lot more fun for everybody, wouldn’t it? No idea if students would like this new format, but it’s definitely something that I want to bring up in discussions, and — if they think it’s a good idea — also give a try some time soon!

A personal story about why I am reluctant to start a class with an intervention

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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 taught together with meteorology, geophysics and physics for the first two years. I didn’t know anyone. Since my dad worked at the same university, I was pretty familiar with how universities work in general (which later turned out to be a huuuge advantage). And I wasn’t nervous about starting university itself, that was just something one did after school. But I was nervous about physics. I had stopped taking physics classes in highschool as soon as that was possible, and I had only taken the minimum required maths (both probably more to do with the teachers than the subjects themselves, but it’s sometimes hard to distinuish). But now, in order to become an oceanographer, I knew I would have to study physics together with people who wanted to become physicists, and who had a much better starting position than I had. Oh well.

The lecture started out with the professor arriving late, and then without any contextualising or welcoming us, or acknowledging that this was our first day at university, just starting going through content that — for all I understood — could have been chinese. He was just standing with the back towards us, scribbling on a blackboard so fast that it was impossible to take notes, mumbling something, and I did not have the faintest clue what was going on. I don’t know for how long it went on, but it felt like forever, and in any case it was long enough for me to feel like I had absolutely no chance to ever succeed there. Then, the professor started making weird and sexist remarks, and I started tuning out. This was not how I was going to spend the next couple of years. Then, at some point, a student asked a question and was rudely dismissed. But then another student spoke up, and another. And at some point — surprise! — we were told that this had not been a real lecture, that the professor was just an older student pranking us, and that also the students speaking up were older students playing a role, and that the whole purpose was to show us that we would have to learn to speak up when things didn’t go the way they were supposed to.

Why am I thinking about this now? In one of the recent iEarth teaching conversations, HC talked about something he had heard about how it was really helping students learn if they were given a really hard exercise right in the beginning. In that case, there wouldn’t be any “smart students” standing out and the not-as-smart students wouldn’t feel dumb, because everybody was equally lost (and the teacher would then help them through it to build confidence and grit and it would be all good, so it’s not the exact same story). But hearing about this triggered that memory of my first ever physics lecture, and I can feel the pit in my stomach now, 20 years later, thinking back to the feeling of definitely not belonging there, in that lecture theatre, in that department. Even though I had not thought about it in at least a decade, I don’t think it’s something I have ever fully gotten over, because even though this was meant as an intervention and the scenario was supposed to be much worse than anything we could ever possibly experience for real, there were many situations later on during my studies that were reminiscent of that experience. Only then, they were not pranks, and there was nobody there to resolve the situation for us, and clearly we hadn’t learned our lesson yet to resolve them ourselves. But each of those new situations seemed to confirm to me that at that very first day, I had been warned, and had ignored it, but that now was the time when I was going to be found out as not belonging. And this personal anecdote makes me feel really reluctant to start out a class with any kind of “intervention”.

P.S.: Looking back, what made me persist throughout all the physics and maths was a) that I REALLY wanted to become an oceanographer, so I just had to do what I had to do (and it turned out to be not as bad as I initially thought), and b) that there were two technicians, Rüdi and Manni, who always ran the experiments for the physics professors. They would be in the lecture theatre before the lectures started, setting up the experiments, and then clearing up after. And they were super friendly and approachable, and me and my friend and this one other guy started hanging out with them, asking them lots of questions, and learning more from them than from all the physics professors combined (or at least that was the case for me). And it’s for the first time today that I am putting together how important Rüdi und Manni were for me to feel like I did belong after all, maybe not to the people who wanted to be theoretical physicists like my friend, and for whom the mathematical derivations were enough (or made that much more sense that they didn’t feel the need for anything else, who knows?); but to a group of people who not only understood the phenomena, but in addition could show that they really existed in real life, could run demonstrations that the professors — despite all their theories — never dared touch. I had found my community, and even though it’s been 20 years and we’ve lost touch, maybe all my #KitchenOceanography goes back to those early experiences with Rüdi and Manni being the teachers the official teachers never were. Thank you! <3

An iEarth teaching conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå on #WaveWatching

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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 workshop), we ended up talking about … #WaveWatching. Not that I’m complaining ;-)

After the conversation, I wrote up the main points as a one-pager, which I am sharing below. Thank you, Kjersti and Torgny, for an inspiring conversation!

—

I use #WaveWatching in introductory courses in oceanography and in science outreach both on social media and in in-person guided tours. #WaveWatching is the practice of looking at water and trying to make sense of why its surface came to look the way it does: What caused the waves (e.g. wind, ships, animals)? How did the coastline influence the waves (e.g. shelter it from wind in some places, or block entrance into a basin from certain directions, or cause reflection)? What processes must be involved that we cannot directly observe (e.g. interactions with a very shallow area or a current)? Kjersti Daae (pers. comm.) suggests an analogy to explain #WaveWatching: Many people enjoy a stir-fry for its taste, like we enjoy looking at water, glittering in the sun, without questioning what makes it special. But once we start focusing on noticing different ingredients and the ways they are prepared, it is a small change in perspective that changes our perception substantially, and leads to a new appreciation and deeper understanding of all future stir-fries (and possibly other dishes) we will encounter.

I teach #WaveWatching using a cognitive apprenticeship leaning (Collins et al., 1988) approach*: By drawing on photos of selected wave fields (in the field using a drawing app on a tablet), I model my own sensemaking (Odden & Russ, 2019). I coach students to engage in the process, and slowly fade myself out. Students then engage in #WaveWatching practice anywhere they find water – in the sink, a puddle in the street, a lake, the ocean. Since waves are universally accessible, this works perfectly as hyper-local “excursions” in virtual teaching: Students work “in the field” right outside their homes.

Waves are not an integral part of the general curriculum in physical oceanography. While some wave processes are relevant for specific research questions, for typical large-scale oceanography they are not. And the concepts used in #WaveWatching are not even new to students, they are just an application of high-school optics to a new context.

Nevertheless, #WaveWatching helps work towards several goals that are important to me:

  1. Using “authentic data” acts as motivation to engage with theory because the connection with the real world makes it feel more interesting and engaging (Kjelvik & Schultheis, 2019).
  2. Engaging in sensemaking and gaining experience on what can (and cannot!) be concluded from an observation are highly relevant skills and this is an opportunity for practice.
  3. Building an identity as oceanographer – seeing the world through a new lens, joining a community of practice (Wenger, 2011), but also being able to demonstrate newfound expertise and identity to friends and family outside of that new community by talking about this new lens – are otherwise rare in socially distant times.

After being exposed to #WaveWatching, people tell me that they can’t look at water in the same way they did before. They are now seeing pattern they never noticed, and they try to explain them or ask themselves what I would see. They often send me photos of their observation years after our last interaction, and ask if I agree with their interpretations. #WaveWatching might thus be a threshold concept, “a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” and where “the change of perspective […] is unlikely to be forgotten” (Meyer & Land, 2003).

—

Literature:

  • Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1988). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 8(1), 2-10.
  • Kjelvik, M. K., & Schultheis, E. H. (2019). Getting messy with authentic data: Exploring the potential of using data from scientific research to support student data literacy. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2), es2.
  • Meyer, J. H. F., and Land, R. (2003) “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising” in Improving Student Learning: Ten Years On. C. Rust (Ed), OCSLD, Oxford.
  • Odden, T. O. B., & Russ, R. S. (2019). Defining sensemaking: Bringing clarity to a fragmented theoretical construct. Science Education, 103(1), 187-205.
  • Wenger, E. (2011). Communities of practice: A brief introduction.

*more on that in this post (that comes online on 21.5.2021).

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

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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 workshops.

I got the idea I will present here from David Morgan (this is his implementation) during the September 2020 “FieldWorkFix during Covid-19” conference, where I experienced the “active lunch break” as a participant. I remember being slightly annoyed that people were trying to hijack my lunch break (which already started out an hour late due to the time difference!), and that I did not completely follow the instructions. David asked us to follow a quasi-random, “bias-free” path determined by “wandering cards” (e.g. “follow something yellow”, “take a right turn”, “sit down for 2 minutes and see what happens”) in order to get us off our well-trodden paths to make it easier to see the world with different eyes and also to lower the threshold of picking something that we feel needs to count as a good example with a clear connection to our subject. So no pressure to go running to the botanical gardens for the biologists, or the beach for the oceanographers! I thought “it’s my lunch break after all, so I will do what I please!” and went the straight down to Kiel fjord, as I do every day. I then took a photo as instructed, “using my subject area as my lens”, and uploaded it to the website. I started the second half of the day with newfound energy and inspiration, glad that I had gotten over my internal resistance and participated.

I have since used a similar active lunch break in three full-day faculty development workshops with approximately 15 participants each. Every time, right before the 1-hour lunch break, I introduce the task. I ask them to take the opportunity to step away from their screens for a bit instead of catching up on email, to get some movement, some natural light, some oxygen. I state that I know that it’s a bit of a leap of faith to spend their lunch break “my way”, but that I would really encourage them to at least step out on their balcony and find *something* that they notice as an expert in their fields, to take a picture and to upload it in a shared google slides document. I share examples of what we did during that initial workshop and of what participants in previous workshops did. I then start the lunch break and anxiously run outside to at least do the task myself, even if everybody else might choose not to. I tell myself that if nobody actually ended up doing the task, it would be a great opportunity to talk about why students might choose to not do the tasks they are given.

As I am walking, I always find something that fascinates me and that I can relate to my interest in oceanography. I take a picture, also take in the nature around me, and relax. I come back and upload the picture, adding a short description of what what the picture shows looks like through my eyes. Then, slowly, the participants return and usually more than 4 out of 5 upload a picture.

When everybody is back and the break is over, I ask them about how it went for them. Each time, someone mentions that they would not have taken the time to take a real break and go outside, had I not encouraged it and connected it to a task that they felt obliged to work on. Then, someone says how they at first thought that it would be impossible to find something to take a picture of, because their research field is so specialized and abstract, and how they were then excited to see something and feel like they were noticing a connection to their field that would be invisible to others, and how that reminded them of how very cool they thought their field was. And someone says how they want to use it on their own students if they have to teach full days and really want to make sure they include a real break.

The kind of pictures that people bring back are very different. For me as an oceanographer as well as for other people in geosciences, it is very easy to relate puddles on the street to the ocean, or children’s windmills to measurements of atmospheric properties. A professor in chemistry took a picture of a climbing rope web on a playground and related it to the crystal structures he is studying. Linguists bring pictures of election posters or advertisements with slogans on them, of flowers that remind them of medieval poetry, of a flower behind a fence that elicits the idea how reading can free the mind. An ecologist showed a picture of a bird’s nest in her conservatory as an example of contextuality of reproduction decisions: Starting to build the nest there seemed a good decision at the time, but then the weather changed and what used to be a secluded and quiet place became a high traffic area for children. Looking through those pictures with the participants is a joyful excursion into the way other people perceive the world, full of wonder and a sense of exploration and excitement.

I really like this “active lunch break” task because of the effect it has on my participants, and on me! So much so that I use this method “just on myself” on long working days, and I have never regretted doing it :)

Have you ever tried something similar? Would you?

Looking at the world through our disciplinary lenses…