Active & Cooperative Teaching Snapshots

In the last few posts I've shared about the active and cooperative teaching strategies workshop I designed and delivered with the faculty team at Owens Community College. After a full day of work on day 1, faculty took what they'd learned, applied it to a teaching segment they'd identified as one they wanted to enhance, and came back on day 2 to teach their revamped segment and get feedback from their peers. Here is what they did!


To set the context, the Owens Community College faculty are members of a hand-selected team of developmental ed faculty in one of several pilot programs of Project DEgree around the country. Their students, typically 18-26 years of age, are first generation and academically underprepared college students. The two-term Project DEgree program combines innovative teaching using active and collaborative teaching strategies with integrated curriculum across two or more courses in developmental reading, writing, math and college success, with wraparound support from a Resource Specialist. We have worked on the integrated curriculum piece for a year and in our last visit together focused on some active and cooperative teaching strategies to put the icing on the cake! Following is an overview of how the awesome Owens team took what they learned and applied it to their identified teaching segments.

Jen, an English instructor, applied some Whole BrainTeaching strategies,

and added a kinesthetic component to her previously "dry content around correct MLA citations," (to quote her), thereby helping us get actively engaged in building correct citations.

After some instruction with the Whole Brain Teaching strategies, each of us had a card with a piece of the citation on it, and we had to work together to reconstruct the citation in the correct order.

Afterwards, she had us use the MLA source book to check our own work.

See other examples of Jen's student-centered and active teaching in these posts.

Alexis, a Resource Specialist and faculty for the College Study Skills course used get-out-of-your chair paired brainstorming incorporating a solutions-focused approach and stimulation of recall of prior knowledge to kick start her lesson on effective reading strategies. In this Stimulate Recall activity, we were paired at newsprint posted around the room and asked to record all the ways that have worked for us when we wanted to remember something that we'd read. This exercise in divergent thinking prepared us to build on our strengths and connect what we knew with something new.

Jim, a math instructor, engaged us in an assessment task for fractions. He used differentiated instruction to present two groups with two different (one more complex than the other) recipes for making chocolate chip cookies. Our instructions were to halve the recipe and mix the batter. I'm afraid I don't have a picture of this because my hands were busy mixing our ingredients in a large zippered baggie! But I do have one of Jim wearing his peer feedback hat (explained a little later) below.

You can read more about Jim's very student centered teaching in the post Statistics Can Get You Pregnant.

Stacy, the Project DEgree Completion Specialist and faculty for the second term college success course used a gallery walk to have all of us record benefits to individual goals we had each created. We traveled around to each person's poster and added our two cents about the benefits of achieving those goals. This activity was designed as an experiential introduction to and Gain Attention activity for the motivational theory of goal setting.

Finally, last but certainly not least, Marge, an English instructor, in an active and cooperative teaching brainstorm used two kinds of similar cereal and had us work in pairs to create a Venn diagram as a pre-writing activity for a compare and contrast essay. Lots of crunching going on in this one!

To model the interdependence and accountability of being members of a learning team, Jen brought us hats to help us "put on" the roles we were assigned as thoughtful observers. Each hat represented a different "watching"and feedback task. The watching tasks were as follows:

I saw…
I heard…
I wonder about…
I was engaged by…
I thought….was awesome
A suggestion for your consideration…

We rotated these tasks, and hats, with each round of observing our peers teach. Jen uses these hats with students to help them take on and own the different feedback tasks with their peers.

I was really looking forward to this workshop going in but never imagined we would have as much fun as we did. The team soaked up everything from day 1 and came back on the second day with teaching segments reinvigorated by the strategies from the first day. The best part is that they all plan to use what they designed with their students in upcoming weeks. I think I'll ask them to comment here to let us know how it turned out!