peer instruction – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading Hockings et al. (2018) on “Independent learning–what we do when you’re not there”

mglessmer — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:23:02 +0000

Hockings et al. (2018) write: “Over recent months and years, the balance between contact hours and independent study time has been one focus of attention, the underlying assumption being that fewer contact hours means poorer value for money and lower quality learning experience“. And that assumption is super common! But: “The number of contact hours measures […]

Source

Currently reading Ramp & Hummels (2025) on “The Carousel: a mutual and parallel learning approach to design for societal transformation”

mglessmer — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:01:30 +0000

Ramp & Hummels (2025) describe the peer-consultation method “carousel“, “a method to facilitate the exchange of perspectives of different actors working in parallel on different challenges“: Each presenter gets 30 minutes to present a project and ask 2-4 peers for input and feedback. In order to manage to present a complex project and still have […]

Source

Currently reading: “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006)

mglessmer — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 08:57:40 +0000

Somehow a print of the “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) article ended up on my desk. I don’t know who wanted me to read it, but I am glad I did! See my summary below. Feedback. I feel like this topic is talked […]

Source

You learn better when you think that you will have to teach

mglessmer — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 11:10:48 +0000

Have you ever worked as student tutor? Then you’ve probably felt like you understood the content of the course you tutored a million times better after tutoring it. Or at least that’s what I hear over and over again: People feel like they understood a topic. Then they prepare to teach it, and realise how […]

Source

How your behavior as an instructor influences how your students behave during peer instruction phases

mglessmer — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 11:12:20 +0000

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that how you behave as an instructor influences how your students work during peer instruction phases. But do you know what you can do to make sure that student discussions are reaching the level of critical thinking that you want? I.e., how do you construct classroom […]

Source

Peer instruction! Combine it with individual thinking or discussions with the whole class?

mglessmer — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 11:57:55 +0000

Make sure it stays silent during the first step of the clicker process. When using clickers in class, there are many different possible ways of implementing clicker questions and peer instruction, for example the Mazur sequence (which is our default sequence) and the Physics Education Research Group at UMass (PERG) sequence. Let’s recall: The Mazur […]

Source

What do I want from my students – sense-making or answer-making?

mglessmer — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 12:45:16 +0000

On different approaches to peer-instruction and why one might want to use them. Having sat in many different lectures by many different professors over the last year, and having given feedback on the methods used in most of those lectures, I find myself wondering how we can define a standard or even best practice for […]

Source

Why talking to your neighbor might help more than listening to the lecturer

mglessmer — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:36:02 +0000

Why does learning through peer instruction work? As you might have noticed by now, I’m a big fan of concept questions combined with “talk to your neighbor” peer instruction. And studies show that talking to your neighbor is often more successful in teaching you new things than listening to the lecturer is. In their paper […]

Source