Take time to think about what you have read and reflected on so far in this tutorial.  Using your experience and creativity, answer the following questions:

What is your plan for incorporating more active learning in your courses? Perhaps you want to incorporate more ice breakers at the beginning of your course. One example is "stand up and be counted" in which you ask students to stand up (for example) if they know who pioneered the discovery of penicillin, or ask who knows how to create a spreadsheet, etc.  The ice breaker can be social or related to a course topic. 

How will you maximize learning and retention? You can give the students a question about the homework content and pair them up the next class to compare and present their responses.  Have students get up and stretch every 20 minutes or so.  Have them 'bullet' the main points of a topic.  Have them relate those bulleted items to a concrete real-life issue. From page 8 in the handout Silberman offers the following suggestions:

• Headlines: Reduce the major points in the lecture to key words which act as verbal subheadings or memory aids.
• Examples and Analogies: Provide examples throughout the lecture and if possible, create a comparison between your material and the knowledge/experience the students already have.
• Visual Backup: Use flip charts, transparencies, brief handouts, and demonstrations that enable students to see as well as hear what you are saying.

What will you do to involve students? Some courses don't have a 'doing' component to them.  We need to find what they need to DO to learn, though. Using open ended questions requires an active response from the students.  Perhaps you can have two students talk about the answer and then tell the class.  Form teams to answer questions.  Think about the 'jigsawing' technique.  How can you use this tool in your classroom? Additional suggestions also from page 8 include:

• Spot Challenges: Interrupt the lecture periodically and challenge students to give examples of the concepts presented thus far or answer spot quiz questions.
• Illuminating Exercises: Throughout the presentation, intersperse brief activities that illuminate the points you are making.  In the third video from the seminar, Silberman gives an example of an activity that shows the importance of 'listening' in class.  He states that instructors can use any demonstration they wish to emphasize a critical point to their students.  Searching teacher resources on the web could provide a teacher with examples of other activities, or colleagues can be used as resources for ideas. 

How will you reinforce what has been taught? You can ask 'what's clear? what's muddy' or any other CAT (Classroom Assessment Technique).  You can have students summarize two main points from the class session.  Silberman asks the participants at the seminar what happens they if don't save the documents they create on their computers.  Of course, the information is lost.  He states that this analogy reinforces the fact that having students recap what they have learned can serve as a way to put the information in their 'memory folder' and save it. He states that research shows that, even in a boring 50 minute lecture, by stopping twice, for one minute each, and having students even look at their notes and recap what you have taught them, the likelihood of them doing better on a test of the material the next day increases by 5 times.

Go back to what you have learned, think about your plan for a particular course.  How will you:

Build Neural Interest?

Maximize Understanding & Retention?

Involve Students?

Reinforce What’s Been Taught?

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