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.
After field trips to three different museums, students create a short 90 second podcast in which they discuss one object encountered. Through this project, students engage with primary artifacts and practice their communication skills.
This activity follows an adjustable sequence of steps and rules for engagement to ensure that all students, even in large classes, are able to find each session clear, accessible, rigorous, and relevant and to feel that the classroom culture offers them an equal opportunity to speak. As part of these routines, hands are never immediately called on when the instructor asks a question. Instead, all students are expected to develop an answer and then collaborate with their peers to develop a group answer, and a representative from each group shares the group’s response. Rules for engagement, explicit criteria for meeting and exceeding expectations, and transparent discussion routines ensure that all students can access the discussion and be optimally challenged during class.
Students are asked to write down a weird or random fact about themselves on a sticky note and to pass it to the person to their left. Each student is then asked to brainstorm logically possible explanations of the fact he or she has received. Through this activity, students learn to distinguish the best or most likely explanations from all the logically possible ones.
In this simulation activity, students decide which of two companies, each using a different CRISPR genome-editing technology, to invest in. They engage with research on CRISPR genome editing to understand how unintended consequences of one technology used for this editing had real-world business implications. The storytelling element adds immediacy to the activity, making it imaginative and engaging, and students are pushed toward achieving higher levels of competence within Bloom’s taxonomy for the subject area.
Faculty develop a national security crisis and simulate placing the students on the National Security Council Staff to develop strategic options to drive U.S. foreign policy. By thrusting students into positions of responsibility for solutions to real-world issues, this activity requires students to draw on what they have learned and to think on their feet, and it fosters a deeper appreciation for the challenges associated with working on foreign policy.
Student groups are each assigned a region experiencing a humanitarian crisis for research. They produce a visual timeline representing the processes precipitating and leading up to the crisis and the relief efforts undertaken in response. As a final project, each group produces an infographic representing a theme or a typology it observes across the different crises explored throughout the timeline exercise.
Students read an advanced paper at the beginning of a course and compile a list of terms they do not understand. As the course progresses, the instructor defines these terms. At the end of the course, students re-read the initial paper to gain an appreciation of how much they have learned.
Students familiar with case study analysis construct their own cases to capture a specific ethical question. They then lead their classmates through the case. This case construction gives students the opportunity to try to stump one another with new ethical dilemmas in civil and focused fashion.
Students use role-playing during a case study to demonstrate narrative leadership and improvise how they would handle a difficult situation if it arose in the workplace. Through this activity, students have a chance to practice leading a group through a moment of disruption.
This learning module teaches medical students how to form a trusting relationship with children and their families during medical encounters, through classroom, tutorial, role-play, and team-based learning.
Students play the role of one of six entities engaged in a partnered military operation with the primary goal of protecting the civilian population under tight time constraints. Students must cooperate with each other to share intelligence that will help meet military objectives and protect civilians, all in line with international law.
Students analyze musical themes from "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring", first as a partnered homework assignment, then during a class discussion, and finally on their own as they passed by in the film.