This Compendium consists of two key sections. Part One provides a theoretical overview of TUS Midwest's commitment to active learning and outlines over 60 different active learning strategies for student engagement. These include sections on: individual, partner and group learning activities. Part Two – The Practitioner Guide presents a practitioner perspective on a significant range of active learning strategies used by TUS Midwest academic staff, across different disciplinary domains. The Compendium also includes a list of helpful resources for practitioners.
This practitioner guide, recently published by Dr. Michael F. Ryan (TUS Midwest, Thurles Campus), is designed to offer an overall framework for successfully developing and facilitating group work processes. It guides the novice practitioner through each stage of the process. It signposts associated challenges and provides suggestions for helpful responses. It also includes a range of resources and tools that can be modified and adapted to each practitioner context, where different disciplinary needs may require different approaches.
Preparing students for a world that did not exist when they were students themselves can be challenging for many teachers. Engaging students, particularly disinterested ones, in the learning process is no easy task, especially when easy access to information is at an all-time high. How then do educators simultaneously ensure knowledge acquisition and engagement? Ron Nash encourages teachers to embrace an interactive classroom by rethinking their role as information givers. The Interactive Classroom provides a framework for how to influence the learning process and increase student participation by sharing
This book explores best practices for effective active learning in higher education. Experienced instructors from different disciplines and countries share their experiences and reflect on best practices, as well as on the theoretical underpinnings of active learning. Contributors share their thinking on strategies based on different active learning methods such as the use of ICTs, collaborative learning and experiential learning, as well as their implications for teaching, assessment, curriculum design and higher education administration.
This book focuses on large and small group educational settings and offers brief strategies to engage learners to assure active learning strategies are core to the learning environment. The book opens with an introduction on active learning principles. Each chapter follows with a specific description of a strategy written by authors who are experienced in using the strategy in a classroom environment with students.
The book details how to design, manage, and maintain an active classroom that balances autonomy and structure. It offers student-centered, practical strategies on sorting, station teaching, and cooperative learning that will help teachers build on students' intellectual curiosity, self-efficacy, and sense of purpose. Using the strategies in this book, teachers can strategically "let go" in ways that enable students to reach their learning targets, achieve more, be motivated to work, learn to collaborate, and experience a real sense of accomplishment.
In Super Courses, education expert and bestselling author Ken Bain Bain, working with his longtime collaborator, Marsha Marshall, tells the fascinating story of enterprising college, graduate school, and high school teachers who are using evidence-based approaches to deliver courses that spark deeper levels of learning, critical thinking, and creativity—whether teaching online, in class, or in the field. Bain defines these as super courses because they all use powerful researched-based elements to build a “natural critical learning environment” that fosters intrinsic motivation, self-directed learning, and self-reflective reasoning. Complete with sample syllabi, the book shows teachers how they can build their own super courses.
A practical self-help guide for new and continuing students who are faced with taking responsibility for their own studies in college and university, this book offers a wealth of practical tips on the crucial learning skills you will need in university. These include motivating yourself to study, taking useful lecture notes, concentrating effectively, and learning to think critically. You will also find tips on developing new skills that have become essential to the modern student, such as how to make the most of virtual learning environments, how to overcome digital distractions, and how to prepare and deliver engaging talks and poster presentations.
While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room's central focal point and disrupt the conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed. The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively.
College teachers all too often still play Sage on the Stage – lecturing to rooms full of passive and supposedly absorbed students. The cutting-edge opposite is still supposed to be the Guide on the Side – facilitating wherever students themselves are already going, mentoring and coaching them along the way. But who says that these are the only – or the best – alternatives? This book advances another and sharply different model: the Impresario with a Scenario, a teacher who serves as class mobilizer, improviser, and energizer, staging dramatic, often unexpected and self-unfolding learning challenges and adventures with students
The Library, Technological University of the Shannon: Midwest