Jigsaw activities have students work in groups to think about different articles. The groups then come together and share their work to produce one detailed, comprehensive document on all the articles for the week.
Student are challenged to think about the meaning of democracy by evaluating whether section is democratic. This discussion led to the installation of several semester-long democratic tools.
Are people predisposed to favor their own groups at the expense of others, even when the group distinction is completely arbitrary? This activity replicates, more or less, the exact experiment used by Henri Tajfel to demonstrate the "minimal group paradigm" used in Social Identity Theory.
There has been an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease. Which policy is best based on the scientific estimations of how many people will be saved? This activity uses this example with poll everywhere (polleverywhere.com) technology to demonstrate framing and prospect theory.
This paper assignment requires students to adopt the perspective of the U.S. Secretary of State or the White House Chief of Staff in order to synthesize the facts of events leading up to the Cuban revolution and propose policy options to the president.
Assigned debates work well for weeks where several competing theoretical approaches are covered. This debate involves competing theories on approaches to explaining political attitudes.
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.
