Trying a new teaching strategy

Although I have previously tried many collaborative learning techniques such as assigning a group of student’s projects to do, I had not tried the Think-Pair-Share technique. Thus after learning about it through the PGCTHE course, I have tested it out for myself in my classroom.

I found this to be a very effective way of ensuring learning in class and found it to meet the demands of my subject. For example, when I was teaching the students about The Sanctity of Life, I posed them with the problem of euthanasia…I basically gave them a situation where euthanasia  seemed like the solution to a problem and asked them to think about it…to think whether euthanasia would have been the best solution. Then I divided them into groups of threes and asked them to discuss their thoughts and opinions among themselves and then to share it with the class. I found that students came up with such wonderful arguments which they would never have bothered thinking about if I had just delivered my lecture. Likewise, I found this strategy applicable to most of the topics in my course. Although the classroom did get a little noisy what with all the discussions going on, but it was controllable as the students were divided into small groups of just three members. All in all, I noticed that this strategy promoted classroom participation by encouraging a high degree of pupil response.

Another teaching technique I tried out asking the students to prepare a topic and to deliver the lecture. The students themselves delivered lectures using multimedia tools. Although earlier I had asked students to prepare and present presentations I had never asked them to teach a whole topic. I found this to work quite smoothly and was even quite surprised at the way some students delivered their lectures radiating poise, confidence and knowledge.

But, of course, what I noticed was that although this method promised the flow of knowledge in my classroom, students being students sometimes missed out some essential points in their lectures.

 

However, over all, I found that both these methods required the students to actively participate in the classroom and thus increased student engagement.