Looking for new or creative ways to actively engage students in and out of class? Regardless of your discipline, preferred instructional strategy, or instructional modality, you’ll find these to be some of the most valuable resources in your teaching toolkit.
Whether you find yourself teaching online, on-site, or a hybrid of both, these free teaching techniques are focused on helping your students learn and retain new knowledge and skills.
Michael Palmer
This free web-based resource has an extensive library of high-quality 3-4 minute videos describing a variety of teaching activities that are "practical to use and address many dimensions of learning." Activities include things like Sketch Notes, Lecture Wrapper, Triple Jump, and many more. There's really no quicker way to learn new evidence-based learning activities.
This interactive tool allows users to apply a number of filters to quickly identify learning activities.
Michael Palmer
The interface to this tool is super easy to use and allows instructors to quickly find new activities by filtering on characteristics like “Difficulty,” Prep Time Required,” “Inclusive Learning,” “Class Size,” and many others. The *Lesson Planning Tool,* also available on the site, allows instructors to build full lesson plans using the activities they discover in the Active Learning Library.
Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty
Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell Major
This book is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers across all disciplines motivate and connect with their students.
Michael Palmer
Organized around strategies to engage students in learning course-related knowledge and skills and techniques for developing learner attitudes, values, and self-awareness, this book offers a wide variety of practical ideas for "enhancing the classroom experience for students and teachers alike." This book and others by Barkley and Major are the ones I recommend most to instructors. They are pedagogical "bibles."
The revised and updated second edition of Student Engagement Techniques is a much-needed guide to engaging today's information-overloaded students. The book is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers across all disciplines motivate and connect with their students.
This edition will provide a deeper understanding of what student engagement is, demonstrate new strategies for engaging students, uncover implementation strategies for engaging students in online learning environments, and provide new examples on how to implement these techniques into STEM fields.
Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty
Elizabeth F. Barkley, Claire H. Major, and K. Patricia Cross
In this book, the authors synthesize the relevant research and theory to support thirty-five collaborative learning activities for use in both traditional and online classrooms.
Michael Palmer
For anyone interested in using small group work to promote student engagement and learning, this book is a must read. It highlights the research supporting the efficacy of collaborative learning, the details of implementation, and provides 30 collaborative learning techniques (CoLTS) organized into categories that broadly describe the pedagogical purpose each is best suited for. Detailed examples illustrate how to use the CoLTS in a variety of settings, including online.
A mountain of evidence shows that students who learn in small groups together exhibit higher academic achievement, motivation, and satisfaction than those who don't. Collaborative learning puts into practice the major conclusion from learning theory: that students must be actively engaged in building their own minds. In this book, the authors synthesize the relevant research and theory to support thirty-five collaborative learning activities for use in both traditional and online classrooms.
This second edition reflects the changed world of higher education. New technologies have opened up endless possibilities for college teaching, but it's not always easy to use these technologies effectively. Updated to address the challenges of today's new teaching environments, including online, "flipped," and large lectures, Collaborative Learning Techniques is a wonderful reference for educators who want to make the most of any course environment. This revised and expanded edition includes:
Additional techniques, with an all-new chapter on using games to provide exciting, current, technologically-sophisticated curricula
A section on effective online implementation for each of the thirty-five techniques
Significantly expanded pedagogical rationale and updates on the latest research showing how and why collaborative learning works
Examples for implementing collaborative learning techniques in a variety of learning environments, including large lecture classes and "flipped" classes
Expanded guidance on how to solve common problems associated with group work
The authors guide instructors through all aspects of group work, providing a solid grounding in what to do, how to do it, and why it is important for student learning. The detailed procedures in Collaborative Learning Techniques will help teachers make sure group activities go smoothly, no matter the size or delivery method of their classes. With practical advice on how to form student groups, assign roles, build team spirit, address unexpected problems, and evaluate and grade student participation, this new edition of the international classic makes incorporating effective group work easy.
Effective teaching begins with engaged teaching. Engaged Teaching: A Handbook for College Faculty provides college faculty with a dynamic model of what it means to be an engaged teacher and offers practical strategies and techniques for putting the model into practice.
Michael Palmer
Unlike other books by Barkley and Cross, this one leans heavily on a learning taxonomy (Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning), which allows instructors to surface learning activities that align with different types of learning (e.g., Application vs. Integration). It's particularly helpful for some of the more difficult learning domains, like Human Dimension and Caring.
Teaching today can be tough, but when done effectively, it can also be a deeply rewarding profession. To become an effective teacher is to begin by being an engaged teacher—intellectually, emotionally, and conatively grappling with the art and craft of teaching. Engaged Teaching: A Handbook for College Faculty provides college faculty with a dynamic model of what it means to be an engaged teacher along with practical strategies and techniques for putting the model into practice. It simultaneously offers a comprehensive but concise survey of theory, research, and practical strategies necessary for improving teaching and learning in higher education. In particular, this text provides instructors with a deeper understanding of the foundations of college teaching, course design, the classroom learning environment, instructional methods, and teaching improvement.
