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Cold War Simulation

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Students take part in a three day simulation of a cold war-era international crisis to experience the challenges of nuclear weapons decision-making and better understand the history of the Cold War. Goals: To give students a better appreciation for four...

Legality of Torture Debate

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In History of Science course "Brainwashing and Modern Techniques of Mind Control," students participate in a role play to debate the legality of torture and other types of coercive interrogation. One of the graduate student teaching fellows sends out the...

Phineas Gage & the Social Brain Field Trip

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Students in a course on the brain and social interaction visit the museum housing Phineas Gage’s skull and discuss it as a case study of the effects of brain injury on social behavior. Goals: To introduce students to the relationship between brain damage...

Course Blog

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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, introduced the course with a class blog, which continued to be used throughout the course for...

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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In this role play, students take on the role of the major players in the drafting and ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The instructions for students are below: UDHR ROLE PLAY Here is some information on how to prepare for class...

Tagging the Infernal

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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, used an online annotation tool to have students tag images and descriptions of hell and create a "tag...

Name Five

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Kellie Carter Jackson, a Harvard College Fellow, created the game “Name Five” for her AAAS118 class. In the beginning of the class, she goes around the room and asks students to list five notable people of different ethnicities to help students understand...

People

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Are College Lectures Unfair?

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DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent? The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. Read more To most of us, it simply...

Additional Resources

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Active Learning Approaches and Ideas MIT OpenCourseWare: The OCW Educator project offers a series of videos on active learning featuring Janet Rankin, the Interim Director of the MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory and her course "Teaching College-Level...

The Galileo Debate

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In this simulation, students become familiar with the arguments used by different players in the debates about Galileo. For this course, there were five different discussion sections. Each section was assigned in advance to one of five positions...

Buzz Groups

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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. Rachel first instructed the class to form groups of 2 or 3. She then assigned different...