Hi James,
I love it! These are great ways to keep students engaged and force them to be attentive.
Patricia Scales
Hi Nancy,
Great way to promote practical learning. Students understand the relevancy of the course when this type of learning takes place.
Patricia Scales
Hi Libi,
I agree! Active learning really is the cure to boredom in the classroom. Students love hands on.
Patricia Scales
I teach Math. I usually start out by describing what we will learn, then I work problems on the board showing how to work a particular type of problem. After I work several problems, I typically ask if anyone in the room would like to work a problem at the board. Almost always, all the students decline.
I think what I will try will be asking students to suggest what the next Step "I" should do on he board, and maybe try to get a discussion amoung the class members whether this suggestion would be a good thing to do, and then progressively work the problem with much more student interaction while completing the problem.
Hopefully, attendance will improve, if I can get the students more actively involved in class. (Thank you for pointing out what show have been the obvious between interaction and attendance.)
This way students do not get bored when they become active in the learning process.
i have been using think/pair/share activities with prompts that come up on my powerpoints. I give each student a 3x5 card and a topic or question to think about, talk to other students about, then share with the class. We have had some great discussions with this. I also recently began placing an essay type question on slides throughout the lecture that covers the material that precedes it. The students discuss the question then share their thoughts with the class.
I teach a course in evaluating patients to determine their risk for possibly having a major medical emergency. Rather than just lecturing about the patient types I have the students role play medical emergencies like a staged heart attack.Then we discuss the patient and how the students reacted to the mock emergency.
Hi Gail,
Billing and Coding active learning probably comes mostly from the computer. Students enjoy technology.
Patricia Scales
In medical billing and coding it is very difficult to come up with active learning methods. I did come up with Coding Bingo, which challenges students to match descriptions with the correct codes. It also provides some competition for students to get Bingo first!
I also allow students to become actively involved in quizzes in the classroom. I let them create some of the actual quiz questions, present material from the text book, and encourage them to excel by questioning them throughout both the preparation and their presentation. It seems to work for me in most instances.
Hi Tim,
Students love it when hands-on learning is involved. Hands-on learning helps information to stick for students.
Patricia Scales
My class is an elective which students have had at least a year of training before they get to my class. At this point we have very little lecture and is almost completly a hands on learning enviroment. I think this is a good example of active learning. We are mostly just for questions and guidance.
Hi Nancy,
Awesome! Students learn better by doing! It is great seeing how students apply theory.
Patricia Scales
We always incorporate at least two hours of lab with two hours of lecture. The lecture is first and the last two hour are labs related to the lecture. This way the students have the concepts and then the practice. We also have a simulation lab where the students can practice BP's, venipunctures, wound care, etc on the manikens.
Hi Rick,
Students really learn better from doing. Students enjoy hands-on activities.
Patricia Scales
I usually just lecture or show my students what the different function keys of our software program do. It is very informative, and I suppose my thought is that they take notes on everything and then go home and practice it.
In reality, I realize that may become overwhelmed with too many notes and not enough practice. I think I will change the class around a bit this time and give them a lot more time to practice hands-on.
Hi Robb,
Awesome way to teach using vocabulary. Students love it when we do things different from the norm.
Patricia Scales
I have a class that I teach using a vocabulary approach. Rather than listing the words and presenting them I place them on a whiteboard. I then like to ask different students to define the word for the class and tell us how it applies to the lesson/concept we are learning about. We also enter discussion on how the word has applied to their personal experience or their potential future. Last, we then analyze the word relationships to see how they apply to each other.
I could make my students more active learners during my lessons by breaking up the lesson plan/lecture or the day. I like to do something different after 15-20 minutes such as discussion, videos, etc. I might have the students summarize what they remember learning/hearing. I might also have the students break the chapter up into sections and have a group or a few students report on what they learned so that everyone can learn from each other.
When considering a topic that I usually present using a pure lecture approach, I could plan for creating a worksheet the students can fill out as they follow along with the lecture or we could fill out the worksheet as a group after presentation.
