The following exercise is adapted from Chet Meyers' opening general session presentation at the 1994 annual Teaching for a Change conference hosted by the Community College of Aurora, Colorado. Prof. Meyers was then working at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He urged the conference participants to make use of his ideas at their colleges. In your word processor or on paper, jot down a phrase or a metaphor or a doodle or a drawing that represents your idea of good teaching.
People learn in a variety of ways.
How we learn something today depends on what and how we learned before. The purpose of active learning is to get students to interact with our disciplines in ways that cause reflection. Students can more readily synthesize new learning with old when they have worked with the new information and somehow made it their own. List in your word processor or on paper ways in which you train students to reflect on course material. Use the questions below as a worksheet to make a commitment to cause your students to reflect on 1 topic for 1 course that you are teaching in this 1 semester.