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Best Practices: A Little Organization Goes A Long WayAt the University of Oklahoma, Larry Michaelson manages to incorporate a lot of active learning in even the largest of classes -- by being well-organized. Michaelson organizes his classes into groups, giving each group member an assigned role in the management of the group activities. One student is responsible for retrieving graded group work, another for keeping accurate minutes of group interactions, another for contacting absent members. The routine is established early in the semester, and, in no time at all, students are coming to class ready to work and getting right down to it without his having to intervene. Leta Diethloff employs a different form of organization at the University of Texas to help students through the dreaded statistics course that all business students must take. Students tend to see statistics as a series of unrelated formulas that they can execute but not understand. Diethloff wants them to see that, within a given category of test, all the formulas are really just variants of the same basic idea. In statistics, each equation subtracts a measure of the sample from the same measure of the population. This difference is then divided by the average variability to see if the difference is really different or just chance. By writing all the related equations on the board at the same time and in a way that emphasizes their similarities, Diethloff is able to communicate the underlying structure to the students in a way they hadn't seen before. |
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