Enhancing Lectures with Interactive Activities

1. Enhancing Lectures with Interactive Activities Elizabeth Malcolm, PhD Associate Professor of Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences Department Coordinator, Earth & Environmental Sciences

2. Why Use In-class Activities? • Participation by all students • Active learning • Engaging and fun for students • Assess student learning • Easy to incorporate into traditional lecture • http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/interactive/index.html

3. “How Am I Doing?” • Multiple choice questions embedded in presentation • “Clickers”, or • Low tech versions: colored index cards or hold up # fingers corresponding to answer choice • Quickly assess student learning • From assigned reading • After activity or lecture on difficult concept

4. Think-Pair-Share • Easily adaptable to a wide variety of questions and activities • Pre-planned or spontaneous • All students participate • Instructor can walk around room assessing and offering assistance

5. Think-Pair-Share Examples: • Write a definition of the greenhouse effect in your own words • Draw a graph showing how temperature changes with height on a windy night and calm night • Label the world map showing where you expect to find fine-grained lithogenous sediment, coarse-grained lithogenous sediment, and biogenous sediment • Conduct a life cycle analysis for gasoline by listing all the potential environmental impacts from cradle to grave. (Half class does gasoline, half corn-ethanol & compare)

6. Think-Pair-Share Example: How much will temperatures change in the future? Model Prediction Model Predictions Why is there a range in the predictions? What factors will lead to different rates of warming? www.ipcc.ch

7. Free-Write • Students write continuously for 5 min without concern for grammar/spelling • In depth thinking on open ended questions • Used for self-reflection or application of course content • Examples: • “How comfortable are you with scientific writing? What are your strengths and weaknesses?” • “Do you agree with the report that climate change should be treated as a national security threat by our government?”

8. Demos • Students make a prediction before • Explain/diagram afterwards • Examples: • Cartesian divers (ketchup packet in soda bottle) • solar bags • Bernoulli “wind” bags • air pressure mat • air cannon • groundwater models www.stevespanglerscience.com/

9. More Elaborate Activities • Class discussion of an assigned article in small groups • Class poster session • Gallery walk/walkabout • Jigsaw • For examples see http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/pedagogies.html

10. Students Sharing Ideas • Students project graph or diagram w/ document camera • Students create posters w/ large post-it notes in class, stick to walls for poster session