Tag Archives: #CoCreatingGFI

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 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, you can look forward to that!). And now, Kjersti and I have come up with the Bingo of Bingos: A “how to design your Activity Bingo for teaching purposes” Bingo! Because who doesn’t love a gamified approach to basically everything?

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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 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 of thing. That is NOT how I use methods, and here is my attempt at explaining what I do instead.

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Published now: “Activity bingo: Nudging students to make the most out of fieldwork”

Kjersti and I, together with Linda and Francesco, just published an article in Oceanography on the fieldwork bingo we developed for the student cruises earlier this year (and that came quite a long way from our first version as a postcard!). I am currently very much on the bingo-as-a-tool-to-nudge-people-to-do-stuff trip (see also my “Universal Design for Learning” bingo), so I am happy to now have an article I can point people to! So go and read Glessmer, Latuta, Saltalamacchia, and Daae (2023): “Activity bingo: Nudging students to make the most out of fieldwork”!

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Developing a “student cruise bingo” to make learning visible & fun

I am super excited to work with Kjersti again on an upcoming student cruise next month; she is such a great teacher and it is always inspiring to observe her interactions with students! Also: We always have lots of fun ideas, and usually act on them pretty spontaneously, too. Like this one: We want to bring a “cruise bingo” with us, so here is what my current planning looks like!

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Currently reading: The impact of content co-creation on academic achievement (Doyle et al., 2021)

One part of co-creation — letting students create learning content for each other — has always been fascinating to me. The idea is that in order to create meaningful materials for others, they have to develop a good grasp of the material themselves, figure out a sequence, fill any gaps in prior knowledge, etc.. Also the materials that are being produced might feel more relevant to peers because they come from their own peer group, might be more current in the way they are presented, … But how well does content co-creation actually work to support learning?

The impact of content co-creation on academic achievement (Doyle et al., 2021)

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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 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 to talk about this?

Cooperative Learning (CL) is a highly structured method (and not to be confused with the much less structured collaborative learning) – the teacher sets very clear rules around how groups form, how students work together in groups, how tasks are structured and shared. The goal is to create “positive interdependence”, i.e. structuring groups and tasks in such a way that students depend on each other in order to complete the assignments, and on “individual accountability”, i.e. making sure that there is no social loafing.

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Students’ sense of belonging, and what we can do about it

Last week, Sarah Hammarlund (of “Context Matters: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Can Reduce Inequities in STEM” by Hammarlund et al., 2022) gave a presentation here at LTH as part of a visit funded by iEarth* that led to a lot of good discussions amongst our colleagues about what we can do to increase students’ sense of belonging, and to the question “what can we, as teachers, do, to help students feel that they belong?”.

Below, I’m throwing together some ideas on the matter, from all kinds of different sources.

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Creating a “time for telling” (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998)

As we are talking more and more about co-creation and all these cool things, I find it important to remember that sometimes, giving a lecture is still a really good choice. Especially when it happens at the right time, when we have created conditions for students to actually want to be told about stuff.

One way to create “a time for telling” for students with very little prior knowledge is described in Schwartz & Bransford (1998), where students work with contrasting cases to the point that they are really curious about why the cases are different (one example I have heard mentioned in this context is the coke-and-mentos experiment, that only leads to this cool fountain when you use diet coke, not any other type of coke. But why???), and are prepared to listen to someone giving them an explanation. In this case, listening to a lecture is perceived as the fastest way to learn the information that is relevant and interesting in this moment, rather than, in many other cases, listening to a boring monologue that needs to be memorised because someone thinks that it should be.

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Article just published: Collaborative Sketching to Support Sensemaking: If You Can Sketch It, You Can Explain It

What a lovely Birthday gift (and seriously impressively quick turn-around times at TOS Oceanography!): Kjersti‘s & my article “Collaborative Sketching to Support Sensemaking: If You Can Sketch It, You Can Explain It” (Daae & Glessmer, 2022) has just come out today!

In it, we describe Kjersti’s experiences with using portable whiteboards that students use to collaboratively draw on in order to make sense out of new concepts or generate hypotheses for outcomes of experiments. It’s a really neat practice, you should check out our article and consider it for your own classes!

Kjersti also wrote a supplemental material to the article with a lot of details how exactly she implements the whiteboards and how she formulates the tasks (find it here).


Daae, K., and M.S. Glessmer. 2022. Collaborative sketching to support sensemaking: If you can sketch it, you can explain it. Oceanography, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2022.208.

Three ways to think about “students as partners”

As we get started with our project #CoCreatingGFI, we are talking to more and more people about our ideas for what we want to achieve within the project (for a short summary, check out this page), which means that we are playing with different ways to frame our understanding of co-creation and students as partners (SaP).

For the latter, I just read an article by Matthews et al. (2019) that identifies three ways that SaP is commonly being written about. Reading this article was really useful, because it made me realise that I have been using aspects of all three, and now I can more purposefully choose in which way I want to frame SaP for each specific conversation I am having.

In the following, I am presenting the three different perspectives and commenting on how they relate to how I’ve been talking — and thinking — about SaP.

Imagining through Metaphors

Metaphors are figures of speech where a description is applied to something it isn’t literally applicable to, but where it might help to imagine a different (in this case, desired) state.

“Students as partners” as a metaphor evokes quite strong reactions occasionally, because it can be perceived as a complete loss of power, authority and significance by teachers; and likewise as too much work, responsibility, stress by students. We moved away from “students as partners” as a metaphor and towards “co-creation”, because when speaking about “students as partners”, we were constantly trying to explain who the students were partnering with, and what “partnership” would mean in practice. So while we were initially attracted to the metaphor and the philosophy behind it, it ended up not working well in our context.

Speaking about the “student voice”, on the other hand, is something that I’m still doing. To me, it implies what Matthews et al. (2019) describe: students powerfully and actively participating in conversations, and actually being heard. But they also warn that this metaphor can lead to structures in which power sharing becomes less likely, which I can also see: if we explicitly create opportunities to listen to students, it becomes easy to also create other situations in which there explicitly is no space for students.

Building on concepts

When grounding conversations on accepted concepts from the literature, it makes it a lot easier to argue for them and to make sure they make sense in the wider understanding in the field.

In our proposal for Co-Create GFI, we very explicitly build all our arguments on the concept of “communities of practice”. Maybe partly because I was in a very bad Wenger phase at around that time, but mostly because it gave us language and concepts to describe our goal (teachers working together in a community on a shared practice), because it gave us concrete steps for how to achieve that and what pitfalls to avoid.

Also in that proposal as well as in our educational column in oceanography, we use “student engagement” as the basis for the co-creation we are striving for. In our context, there is agreement that students should be engaged and that teachers should work to support student engagement, so starting from this common denominator is a good start into most conversations.

Another concept mentioned by Matthews et al. (2019) are “threshold concepts”, which isn’t a concept we have used in our own conversations about SaP, but which I found definitely helpful to consider when thinking about reactions towards the idea of SaP.

Matthews et al. (2019) point out that while building on concepts can be grounding and situating the way I describe above, it can also be disruptive.

Drawing on Constructs

Of the three ways of talking about SaP, this is the one we’ve used the least. Constructs are tools to help understand behaviour by basically putting a label on a drawer, such as identity, power, or gender. Looking at SaP through the lens of different constructs can help see reality in a different way and change our approach to it, or as Matthews et al. (2019) say: “revealing can lead to revisiting”.

I know it’s not the intention of the article, but I am wondering if taking on that lens just for fun might not reveal new and interesting things about our own thinking…


Kelly E. Matthews, Alison Cook-Sather, Anita Acai, Sam Lucie Dvorakova, Peter Felten, Elizabeth Marquis & Lucy Mercer-Mapstone (2019) “Toward theories of partnership praxis: an analysis of interpretive framing in literature on students as partners”. In: teaching and learning, Higher Education Research & Development, 38:2, 280-293, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2018.1530199