OZARKA COLLEGE

Eating an Elephant

One Bite at a Time

We begin this week by looking at a couple of group work exercises. The first requires students to work as a group to break up complex ideas into their component parts. This group exercise allows students to benefit from the other students learning styles and experiences while they hone critical thinking and analytical skills.

The next group exercise allows two groups to work independently of each other. Each group becomes the "expert" on the information or problem they are dealing with and then teaches that set of information to the other group. In this way, both groups analyze the material closely, so they can then create a "lesson plan" for their counterparts. This method seems like it would work very well with every learning style

Visual Lists - Here students are asked to make a list--on paper or on the blackboard; by working in groups, students typically can generate more comprehensive lists than they might if working alone. This method is particularly effective when students are asked to contrast views or to list pros and cons of a position. One technique which works well with such comparisons is to have students draw a "T" and to label the left- and right-hand sides of the cross bar with the opposing positions (or 'Pro' and 'Con'). They then list everything they can think of which supports these positions on the relevant side of the vertical line. Once they have generated as thorough a list as they can, ask them to analyze the lists with questions appropriate to the exercise. For example, in science classes this would work well with such topics as massive vaccination programs, nuclear power, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and so forth.

Jigsaw Group Projects – In jigsaw projects, each member of a group is asked to complete some discrete part of an assignment; when every member has completed his assigned task, the pieces can be joined together to form a finished project. There are two variations of Jigsaw. The first is the easiest to implement. It is called Within-Team Jigsaw. If the instructor is using the playing cards organization, and there are four members of a team, the red suits takes half the puzzle and the black suits take the other half. The two pairs master their half of the material and then teach it to the other half. The ease of this variation is that the "puzzle" can only have two parts.

If you have time and don't want to wait for the next bite, you can find the rest of the toolbox in myOzarka under the "Ozarka Resources" tab.

Or you can follow this link:

https://www.ozarka.edu/files/resources/teachingtoolbox.doc

I will be posting each section in the Student Success Center Blog. So if you are interested in checking out "back bites," you can find them there.

Or you can follow this link:
https://www.ozarka.edu/blogs/success/index.cfm/Weekly-Postings-for-Faculty-

Hope you enjoyed it.