In EPS182, Professor Francis MacDonald's students take a spring break trip to Sicily to study the geology of the region. They later use this information to write mock geology journal articles.
In this activity, students break up into small groups and decide on a modification to the setup of the classic Schelling Residential Segregation model.
In their History and Literature Sophomore Tutorial, Rachel Gillett and her co-instructors strengthened student discussions by directly modeling how to have an academic conversation.
In this midterm review activity, students practice answering multiple choice questions on a wide variety of topics by working in pairs to answer review questions for the midterm.
This language activity asks students to bring a literary, scientific, historical or artistic page that they can relate to the common text and which has new vocabulary. They present these texts and use it to build vocabulary and analyze the text.
Rachel Gillett reports that in the History and Literature Sophomore Tutorials, students are required to do three oral presentations with the help of the instructors in order to hone their public speaking and critical thinking skills.
Revolutions require collective action. This simple activity, used during the week on revolutions, demonstrates the difficulty of carrying out collective action.
In the revision stage of their the paper, Jerusha Achterberg uses vegetables to teach students how to structure their papers so that the organization coordinates with the thesis. The idea behind this activity is to break the 5 paragraph mold students bring from high school.
This group discussion format can be used in a week that covers several big concepts, each of which can be discussed along a similar ("parallel") sequence of discussion questions. The concepts in this particular class are: Wisdom of crowds, Heuristic decision-making, Groupthink, and Cooperation.
In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin used the song "Den första gång jag såg dig" (The First Time I Saw You) by well-known Swedish troubador Birger Sjöberg to help students learn past-tense verbs and about Swedish culture.
