Teaching Today publishes innovative teaching tips on a weekly basis. Written with the busy teacher in mind, each tip is concise, practical and easy to implement in the classroom right away. Topics covered in Teaching Today are classroom management, career development, high stakes testing, instruction and planning, parental involvement, reading in the content areas, using technology in the classroom, and portfolio development. Teaching Today also offers free weekly downloads that correspond to the tips. Our free downloads make implementing the teaching tips even easier. Teaching Today provides educational resources for teachers looking for everyday solutions to the challenges of the classroom.
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Teaching Today - This Week's Tips Teaching Today - This Week's Tips

This Week's Topic

Active Learning—Part 2
Learning requires active participation by learners. Students don’t learn by sitting and listening to lectures, reading textbooks, and answering questions on tests. Students must talk and write about their learning, and relate their learning to experiences. This is active learning, the subject of this week’s tips.

This Week's Tips

Active Lecturing for Active Listening (Monday)
Active learning is engaging students in an activity that allows them to reflect and comment on the learning. To help students move beyond memorization and to higher levels of learning such as analyzing and synthesizing, use these guidelines: Break up lectures with questions. Open the lecture with questions raised from the last class meeting. In the middle of the lecture, have students work in pairs to discuss key points of the lecture.

Barriers to Active Learning (Tuesday)
New ways of learning often meet with barriers. Do you stubbornly want to hold onto the control that lectures provide? Is your institution pressuring you to not experiment? Is there a fear from your students of taking risks? Remember the following: Active learning allows learners to reach a greater depth of learning without sacrificing coverage. Rather than allowing students to learn only surface knowledge, active learning forces students to a deeper understanding.

Active Lecturing with Large Classes (Wednesday)
Discussions can take place in classes with 100 students or more. Follow these guidelines for successful active lecturing with large classes: Build in time for questions from students. Punctuate lectures with thought-provoking questions that require student analysis. Assign group work. Have students exchange phone numbers to work on specific projects related to the course. Have small groups work together in class to outline the material.

Active Learning Techniques (Thursday)
Role playing, debates, case studies, and simulations require students to take an active position in their learning. Debate requires students to take a committed position on a topic. Role playing allows students to act out a historical event. Try these activities: In a biology class, have students work together and role play different parts of the body. In a business or political science class, use real-world cases and place students in the role of decision maker.

Cooperative Learning: A Way to Grow and Learn (Friday)
Cooperative learning offers an opportunity for students to experience a learning method that allows them to expand their current thinking. Teamwork and cooperative learning groups engage students in an active learning process at higher levels of thought processes. Studies show that students learn faster and retain more information when they are engaged in their own learning process. Students learn from each other as well as from you.

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