CETL Summer Workshops

5 Active Learning Strategies to Try in Your Classroom

/ Geoff Benn / 1 Comment

This is the third in a collection of posts about topics covered in “A Learner-Centered Approach to Effective Teaching,” a workshop series offered by the UC Davis Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). By writing these posts, I hope to solidify my grasp of the topics covered and provide useful information for the college teaching community.

Think about how you would teach someone to change a tire on a bicycle.

I would probably talk through the process with the person, answering questions as we went. Then I would demonstrate how the process works on one wheel, and ask the person to try changing the tire on the other wheel. What I probably wouldn’t do is show the person a series of slides on how to change a tire and then ask them to come back in a month to try it out for themselves. The first approach, which I think is much more natural, is an example of active learning – the student is constructing knowledge as they go and actually tries to solve a problem. The second approach is an example of passive learning, where the student simply receives the information from the instructor without really engaging with it. Continue reading →

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Backward Design: An Introduction

/ Geoff Benn / 2 Comments

This is the first in a collection of posts about topics covered in “A Learner-Centered Approach to Effective Teaching,” a workshop series offered by the UC Davis Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). By writing these posts, I hope to solidify my grasp of the topics covered and provide useful information for those unable to attend the workshop.

We began the first workshop in the series, “Where to start: Backward design and student learning outcomes,” by thinking about how courses are typically planned in the instructor-centered model of learning. In this model, the instructor uses their expertise to assemble lectures that transmit knowledge to students about a particular topic. One difficulty with this approach is that, for any given topic, there is far more information available than can possibly be covered in single lecture (or even an entire semester in many cases). How, then, do instructors typically decide what to include? Continue reading →