Tips and Example

Improving student-student classroom interaction

• In order to students interact at different scales and engage in discussion classroom. The teacher use…
• In-class assignments where students think individually about a question, talk to their peers about an idea, and then report their findings back to the class. These think pair share exercise work best when there are multiple answers to a question (nurturing and valuing divergent thinking).
• Conceptual multiple-choice questions about themes from the lesson mingled with peer instruction. The use of clickers can facilitate this technique.
• More structured discussion exercises, for example jigsaw strategies where students become experts in some facet of a topic and then work as teams of mixed experts to further explore a topic.
• One or more cooperative learning technique .

• In order to students work on open-ended problems to encourage in-depth conversations with each other and with me. The teacher use…
• Open-ended questions. These are questions with more than one right answer and encourage students to make a judgment call.
• Structured academic controversies in which small teams of students learn about a controversial issue from multiple perspectives and attempt to come to consensus.
• Explorations of data in classroom. Encourage students to delve into the real data to decide how best to interpret it.

·     The teacher want to use specific teaching strategies

·         To achieve this goal, it is necessary to provide opportunities to hear student voices and act on ideas originating with the students.

·         Immediate low stakes, formative assessment of concepts can be readily achieved using concept test , conceptual multiple-choice questions about themes from the lesson mingled with peer instruction. The use of clickers can facilitate this technique.

·         More detailed feedback that will be sufficient to shift the direction of the lesson to meet key student learning needs will often require open-ended questions that allow students to identify what they already know and where the instructor can best invest time and resources.

·          The teacher want to capitalize on the diversity of student experiences to generate alternative    solutions to problems and/or encourage different ways of interpreting evidence.

• The more structured and organized a task, the less opportunity there is for students to bring their experience and creativity to bear on finding a solution. Activities that provide the problem, procedures the students should follow, and type of analysis to be conducted leave little room for the students to contribute original thought. Consider adapting open-ended questions where the problem is presented but some combination of procedures, method of analysis, and/or communication of results are left for the students to design.
• Example of exercises are structured academic controversies may provide a model for this type of cooperative learning strategy in which small teams of students learn about a controversial issue from multiple perspectives and attempt to come to consensus.
• In these more student-centered learning environments, instructors can serve as resource persons, navigating the room to keep groups on task and provide assistance in guiding discussion.

·  The teacher want to provide sufficient time to have meaningful discussions around student activities and arrive at fully realized responses.

• It is necessary to provide sufficient time for students to process class information and transfer it to new problems. Such efforts ensure that learning is happening during class. One simple method to begin this process is to provide structured breaks for students to be reflective in their response to questions.
• Longer activities will typically allow for greater student creativity and encourage synthesis of more concepts. Building these activities into a traditional lecture class will require some lesson redesign. For example, some material may simply be omitted, other items may be shifted to pre-class readings or post-class homework.