Tag: method

Another walk, another podcast episode! The Cult of Pedagogy podcast had an episode on “3 fresh ideas for structuring professional development” and their discussions were really interesting!

Published on the 23rd of December! Check it out here! K. Daae, C. Bovill & M. S. Glessmer (23 Dec 2025): How academic developers can use modelling to promote active learning and co-creation, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2025.2602863

New article published! “Adapting a Teaching Method to Fit Purpose and Context” (Glessmer, Bovill & Daae; 2024), based on this blogpost, but a little more thought through and polished with Cathy and Kjersti in beautiful Voss! Check it out here, and enjoy!

My friend Sigrid does short interviews with trainers and facilitators on her company Memogic‘s youtube channel, and I watched the interview with Inna Fischer (in German) yesterday. Inna’s energy was super inspiring, and she mentioned the “Liberating Structures”, which I then realized I had never blogged about before. So here we go!

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 written on how to make grading less painful, only to realize later that I wrote that post, but never actually posted it! So here we […]

An example of one topic at different levels of difficulty. Designing exercises at just the right level of difficulty is a pretty difficult task. On the one hand, we would like students to do a lot of thinking themselves, and sometimes even choose the methods they use to solve the questions. On the other hand, […]

Examples of different kinds of multiple choice questions that you could use. Multiple choice questions are a tool that is used a lot with clickers or even on exams, but they are especially on my mind these days because I’ve been exposed to them on the student side for the first time in a very long […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Quick feedback tool for your teaching, giving you concrete examples of what students would like you to continue, start or stop This is another great tool to get feedback on your classes. In contrast to the “fun” vs “learning” graph which gives you a cloud of “generally people seem to be happy and to have […]

Quick feedback tool, giving you an impression of the students’ perception of fun vs learning of a specific part of your course. Getting feedback on your teaching and their learning from a group of students is very hard. There are tons of elaborate methods out there, but there is one very simple tool that I […]