Students travel back in time to 19th-century Japan, assuming the roles of advisors to the Tokugawa shogunate. They must synthesize primary readings on social and political unrest to propose reforms that could prevent the regime from collapsing.
Students develop skills in critical paper reading by working through a series of active learning exercises. At different stages of the jigsaw activity, students work together to develop an understanding of one piece of the figure, and then teach and learn from each other in a dynamic classroom.... Read more about Paper Figure Jigsaw
In this single-class activity, students receive a lab handout with background information about the dissections for the day, which include bolded terms/anatomical features that they are expected to know for a following practical exam in that topic.... Read more about Peer Learning for Dissection
This activity teaches skills in critical assessment of the peer-reviewed published literature. It focuses on analysis of clinical trials in mental health, but the principles and methods are readily generalizable to other scientific literature. The “Smackdown” approach represents an augmentation of the traditional “journal club” mode of teaching critical scientific reading skills.
Students experience what it is like to be an expert in a field by focusing their research and writing on a single fairy tale and its adaptations throughout the course of a semester.
Created by Kostia Bergman, Erin Cram, Wendy Smith, Scott Dobrin, Presque Isle, and Judith Roe, this lesson for an intermediate Cell Biology course encourages students to take a big-picture view of the cell by comparing cells to buildings in order to think about the dynamic processes within cells. The lesson utilizes a jigsaw and quick write.
Created by Jillian Banks, Jeremy Brown, Cindy Gordon, Chris Gregg, Travis Marsico, Chris Osovitz, and Rebecca Symula, this activity focuses on the importance of temporal scale and specifically seeks to resolve the common student misconception that evolutionary change is only observable on a single timescale. It utilizes index cards in an interactive jigsaw.
Created by Moriah Beck, Masih Shokrani, Karen Koster, William Soto, David McDonald, and David Swanson for the National Academies Northstar Institute for Undergraduate Teaching in Biology, this activity spans 2-3 classes and uses lecture, clicker questions, jigsaws, and group discussions to teach the relationship between protein structure and function.
In Megan Kate Nelson's course on the American Civil War, students complete a final class project and paper that involves primary document research and public history activities to present history through objects and documents.
In CB51: Making the Middle Ages, the teaching staff, consisting of Professor Dan Smail and TFs Rowan Dorin, Zoe Silverman, Joey McMullen, and Rena Lauer, had students read a common text on a medieval saint, extract all the place names mentioned, and map them in order to learn about the nature of communication in the Middle Ages, geographic analysis, and how to use WorldMap, a way to create and publish maps of geospatial information.
To prepare students for an exam, the teacher sets up essay questions on posters around the room for students to review. The movement helps keep energy up at the end of the semester.
In her class "France and the World: Human Rights, Race, and Revolution," Rachel Gillett had small groups work on different questions in order to stimulate discussion.
In this activity, David Weimer used different articles on "segregation academies" following Brown v. Board of Education in order to teach students how to evaluate information from a source and consider the origin of the information.