188 Peer-to-Peer Learning 09.11.2019

This week’s Wednesday meeting of the Active Teaching Lab (09.11.2019) discussed numerous ways to leverage peer-to-peer learning in an active classroom. With examples from high-enrollment Physics courses to an intimate accelerated Italian language course, this week’s lab dug into activities, lesson design, and different assessment strategies!

Takeaways

• Several types of activities can be organized and adapted to meet instructional needs and settings, here are a few that our contributors mentioned during the lab: 
  • Think Pair Share
  • Peer Review of Lab Reports
  • Group Writing 
  • Info Gap Activities 
  • Jigsaw activities 
  • Roleplay
• Add “Think Time” to your course! Asking students for an immediate response is often a recipe for a quiet classroom or for under-developed responses from your students. Making time for students to consider course content, to reflect on their own perspectives, and even to share them with a small group of peers is a great way to encourage a larger, more nuanced conversation. 
  • Tip: Have a discussion question ready to go on the slides to engage students in the few minutes before class starts!
• Canvas Peer Review Tool is rich with potential for peer-to-peer learning. Asking students to read and comment on their work at the early stages of an assignment helps them gauge how much they already know and/or how they can improve their presentation and delivery. Modeling feedback often leads to more effective commentary from students, who might not bee too familiar with the process. Not sure to get started with Canvas Peer Review? Check out this Canvas Community Page to get going!
• For more information visit the session’s activity sheet.

Video

The Active Teaching Lab is a Faculty Engagement program with sessions held on Wednesdays from 1:00-2:00pm and Fridays from 8:30-9:45am in the Middleton Building (1305 Linden Dr.), room 120. Check out upcoming Labs or read the recaps from past Labs. We build interdisciplinary conversations that are more emergent than a presenter and more dynamic than a panel — a conversation with colleagues sharing challenges, solutions, and experiments on topics selected by a variety of stakeholders.

Sign up for regular Lab announcements by sending an email to join-activeteaching@lists.wisc.edu.