HELIX Classroom allows your students across the world to feel fully included in your classroom. HELIX Classroom enables you to connect meaningfully with all your students, but what happens when your course is big? In this series, we’ll discuss best practices for teaching in a HELIX Classroom with a large number of students.
The classic active learning technique, the think-pair-share, can work just as well in your HELIX Classroom. In think-pair-share, you pose a question to your students and invite them to turn to their neighbor to discuss the answer. The class then discusses the question together. While teaching in HELIX Classroom, you can have your in-person students turn to each other and break your Zoom students into breakout rooms.
Think-Pair-Share: Remixed
Having each student group share out is likely not possible in your class. Instead, you can poll all your students before and after they’ve considered the question in their groups. That way, you can get a general sense of the shift in thinking. Using a multiple-choice poll before students break out into groups allows students to see the variety of responses among their classmates. As your students form into their groups, you can invite them to convince or show their groupmates their answer is the right one.
How to Do It
Harvard currently has a site-wide license to PollEverywhere, a powerful polling tool that allows you to make quick multiple-choice polls students can answer from their laptops or mobile devices. You can keep these polls open for your students who are watching your lecture recording at a later time.
Ways to Use it
This approach can work for a variety of classes, such as:
- Problem-based questions: You can post a question for students to solve and poll students for the initial answers. While in groups, students can convince each other of their right answers or show unsure groupmates how they came to the answer. Read about how Harvard professor Eric Mazur uses this approach in his undergraduate class.
- Debates: The poll can simply ask if students agree or disagree with a statement or approach. Students can then see the diversity in responses before going into their separate groups.
Breakout Rooms for Small Talk
The moments before class starts is a great time for students to get to know each other. Give your students who are joining your class over Zoom the chance to have this small talk as well. If you have a teaching assistant in your class, you can have them place students into breakout rooms before class officially starts. Remind your students these breakout rooms are just for chatting and there is nothing specific they have to talk about. This becomes especially powerful if you put them into breakout rooms every week. Your students will vary the way they attend your class through the semester and small-talk breakout rooms are a fantastic way for your students to meet all of their classmates.
Got Questions?
Email Karina Lin-Murphy at karinalin@fas.harvard.edu if you'd like to talk through teaching practices in your HELIX Classroom. You can email HELIX_Classroom@dce.harvard.edu for ideas, concerns, and all things HELIX Classreoom.