Last week the LEaD School of Health Sciences (SHS) and School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) School Liaison Team ran its Autumn term Innovators’ session. We had the pleasure of hearing about SASS lecturer Leonie Fleischmann’s online toolkit of teaching activities, which she developed in collaboration with LEaD.
After explaining the rationale behind this resource and the impact that the activities had on her students’ learning, Leonie invited the participants to browse the online resource and discuss some of the activities and how they could adapt them to one of their classes. The point of the toolkit is to present ideas that are adaptable in terms of content and format, at times also presenting alternatives and ready-made templates to make this resource very practical for time-pressured academics.
Leonie also highlighted the importance of structuring seminars around different types of activities to engage students: opening activities, or triggers, intermediate and closing activities. Finally, participants were invited to discuss how to design one of their teaching sessions bearing this structure in mind and adapting some of the activities presented in the toolkit. It was interesting to hear from academics on how they could see these activities being used or adapted within their discipline and also at larger scale such as in lectures.
It was clear from the questions and comments that many lecturers have an interest in this resource and are keen to use and adapt some of the activities. Leonie also invited them to share their own practice and new activities will be added to the toolkit as we hear from them.
You can download the slides from Leonie’s presentation here:
You can find the toolkit here: blogs.city.ac.uk/smallgroupteaching
If you have any ideas for activities that could be added to the blog or if you have any ideas for educational projects involving educational technologies then please drop us an email and we will be happy to work with you.
This was a really good session Sarah and I thought your work with Thomas was excellent. I’m keen to see a link to the real active learning spaces that Leonie and other colleagues need for this student-centred approach.
I really liked this toolkit too – an excellent example of high quality output, delivered in collaboration with an academic, and on something that was usable for her personally, more widely within SASS/City, and equally outside for the wider sector.
I’d agree with James here on seeing that more of a link with our active learning spaces could be a next stage development for this toolkit. When Santanu, Jorge and I were in the first learning spaces theme, we developed a series of blog posts that covered a similar approach to this toolkit and which also included both spaces and educational technologies that colleagues could use for running the activities in/with. They’re quite old now, but maybe could be useful for thinking about how spaces and digital technologies could also be incorporated into the toolkit:
Think-Group-Share
One-Minute Paper
Six Hats of Critical Thinking
Learning Cell
Fishbowl Technique
Buzz Groups and Snowballs
Debating and Presentations
The Jigsaw Classroom
Post-Its, Posters and Problem-Based Learning
Classroom Carousel
Thanks Dom. Yes we discussed the PST framework and agree that the toolkit would benefit from the space dimension and concrete examples using City spaces, working on this now and will be using your blog posts.
Thanks James, working on integrating learning spaces considerations into the toolkit
I really like the idea of using this toolkit as a showcase for other schools. This is most definitely an opportunity to help staff working around making sessions more engaging. i think the other schools would really value seeing this in their suite of workshops. One for the RLs to consider. Perhaps an online webinar?
Great work and an example of collaborative work between LEaD and SHS.
Definitely Rae, these activities do not only apply to International Politics and they can also be repurposed. Should you know of academics at City who have tried these and would want to share their experience and/or have other activities to suggest, please let me know!