Читать книгу Small Teaching - James M. Lang - Страница 19

Predictive activities are the ideal starting point for a small teaching approach, because they are so easy to slot into the opening and closing of a learning unit. These reliable prediction activities give you some practical starting points.

 Open the course with a class brainstorming activity in which you ask students to surface their prior knowledge. Give them time individually or in small groups, and then work as a class to organize that knowledge in ways that will set up the learning to come.

 At the beginning of the class, unit, or course, give students a brief pretest on the material. For example, give an opening-week pretest that is similar in format to the final exam.

 Use classroom polling to break up your course lectures and ask students questions about the next topic you will cover. Pose the question, have them respond with whatever poll technology you are using, and then invite some paired or whole-class discussion of their responses before you move into your explanation.

 When presenting cases, problems, examples, or histories, stop before the conclusion and ask students to predict the outcome. Invite them to reflect afterward on why they got it wrong or right. In other words: pause, predict, ponder.

 Close class by asking students to make predictions about material that will be covered in the next class session.