Activating methods as a tool for effective teaching

Teaching is an almost inevitable part of academic life. Since I predict several teaching assignments on my career path, I recently decided to enroll in a course about activating teaching methods [1]. I had no prior knowledge about what these methods entailed, but enrolled in the course simply because I was not familiar with any teaching methods aside from frontally presenting information to students. 

So, on the day of the course, I entered the seminar room willing to be surprised, and that happened immediately: the first thing the instructor asked me to do was to draw a playing card from a deck. I took my seat, still curious about what the use of the card was, only to be shortly summoned by the instructor to form a group with the other participants that had the same card color as I did and to talk about what expectations we have from the course. If my thoughts were in any way astray at the very beginning of the course, at this point I was positively surprised, and excited that I would not have to sit through eight hours of someone monotonously lecturing, and be much more engaged with my peers and the course.

From Daydreaming to Participating

Engagement with the content is precisely what activating teaching methods are about. In the past, classroom dynamics were always dominated by the teacher. As a pupil, your engagement level could be on a continuum from overzealous question-asker to daydreaming scenery-admirer. To ensure that as many students as possible actually profit from class, activating teaching methods seek to help the students stay alert and, as the name suggests, actively participate in class. This way, the task of content delivery is shared by teacher and students. The art of teaching thus morphs from designing speeches and slides into finding ways for bringing out the best ideas from the students themselves.

Active methods bring out the best in students

 

There are many small exercises that can be used to achieve this, ranging from the well-known drawing of mind maps and explaining concepts to peers, to more obscure, but just as useful ones, like blacking out everything not essential in a text within a short timespan or speculating about how parts of a process might work together before being taught the specifics (see Box below) [2]. What all of these methods have in common is that students are encouraged to mindfully handle the task, to process content that was taught within the same course unit, and to make connections to prior knowledge. As I found out myself, these characteristics help students remember the matter with more ease, and reduce the effort of making all the connections from scratch when studying individually after class.

Alternating Teaching Phases

Naturally, these techniques are no one-size-fits-all solution for every teaching context. Activating teaching techniques only make sense when used in alternation with timespans where the students receive information from the instructor. The idea of alternating these two phases comes from the educationalist Klaus Döring [3]. The beauty of this approach is that it can be applied both for individual units as well as the entire course. One example of this could be interspersing units in which the students have to provide most of the content, like giving presentations or preparing posters.

CRISPR-Cas teaching model

I went on to use these methods in a course I taught to high schoolers about the CRISPR-Cas technology. My conclusion is that activating teaching methods require a much more intensive kind of preparation as a course instructor than plain presentations. One does not only have to have a clear array of concepts that students must learn in a given course unit, but also script-writing skills in order to orchestrate an engaging balance between the different types of activities, minimal crafting skills in order to prepare appealing materials and moderation skills in order to keep the course on the right track. Tiring as this endeavor might be, it resulted in highly positive feedback, both for the course I audited and for the one I taught.

“Divining models” is a technique that requires groups of students to make connections to previous knowledge and discuss them in order to solve a puzzle composed of paper pieces. The paper pieces can either be inscribed with parts of a process or shaped like the pieces of a complex, and they have to be brought in the right order or arrangement. I used this when teaching high schoolers about CRISPR-Cas systems: each group received an envelope with pieces representing the Cas9 protein, the target DNA, the tracrRNA, and they had to figure out how the DNA cleaving complex is assembled.

[1] Training with Elmar Groß at the Charité Gesundheitsakademie, 27th of April 2017, www.orbium.de

[2] Plocher I, Staiger M, Jösch G.: Train the Trainer. 2011

[3] Döring, KW: Handbuch Lehren und Trainieren in der Weiterbildung. 2008

by Ioana Weber, PhD Student AG Tarabykin

This article originally appeared September 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 3, Spirituality in Science