TEACHING TIDBITS AS AN ENGAGING TOOL FOR STUDENTS EFFECTIVE AND GROUP LEARNING: NEW AND AUSPICIOUS INSIGHTS FOR PROFESSORS AND INSTRUCTORS (Invited Presentation)

In most universities the Center for Teaching and Learning recognizes the challenges of finding time to research, plan, and execute new ideas that can support students learning and group engagement. As a result, we present short teaching tidbits that serve as a resource for tips, reflections, tools, and new teaching strategies. The aim is to provide an environment where faculty can adapt, share and learn new teaching strategies based on episode of teaching tidbits, pedagogy tips, hands-on activities, or other teaching strategies to support student’s effective learning.

In this presentation, we present teaching tidbits and learning strategies in the form of Think-Pair-Share (TPS), Think-Aloud (TA), Jigsaw, and Peer Instruction (PI) as a great way to encourage students to do group work. We have observed that these learning strategies encouraged students to think about what they know, listen to each other's ideas, and share their knowledge with their partners before exchanging partners during group assignments. This could be based on two self-selected partners and two randomly assigned partners as well. In addition, we have complemented these teaching methods and learning strategies with response devices such as clickers, kahoot, gamification, etc., in which students think about their answer on a question and vote a response before a neighbor to discuss as a stimulus for large class discussion. This strategy works for assessments, labs, literature circles, and study groups as a reminder for student’s expectations whenever they work in group. Thus, our talk calls for a new collaborative learning that could allow students to solve problems, construct explanations, critique other students’ reasoning, and engage in rich academic discourse.