In this classroom project, students and faculty help a local housing non-profit identify area U.S. Census tracts most in need of its assistance in promoting decent and affordable homeownership to low- to moderate- income individuals. While this example describes an experience in a small, upper-level elective economics course, it includes suggestions for modifications of design and learning goals for other learning levels and environments.

This report provides information for administrators, researchers, and student support staff in local education agencies who are interested in identifying students who are likely to have near-term academic problems such as absenteeism, suspensions, poor grades, and low performance on state tests. The report describes an approach for developing a predictive model and assesses how well the model identifies at-risk students.

WOUB Team shares basics of its digital Storytelling project and shares ways to use digital storytelling across curriculum areas.

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Google Drawings is Google's least used tool especially as you move into online courses for your students. Find out how to use Google Drawing to promote interaction by creating interactive posters and drawings, collaborative comic strips for digital storytelling and even just a simple interactive whiteboard for your students to collaborate in real time during their online experience.

Google Keep allows you to save what is on your mind, and retrieve information later. Discover how to engage students to take notes, access them, and insert them into different formats.

Did you know you can make checklists, find totals, sums, and averages really quickly in Google Sheets? This tool takes productivity to the next level. During this PD you will learn how rows, columns, and cells can work for you! Caryn Kelly from SOITA shows how to use Google Sheets.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants -- prepared to work productively with students -- have been used to facilitate ungraded, voluntary oral assessments offered prior to exams. Oral assessments last one hour, and are offered prior to the three course exams. Orals are geared to improve student understanding and allow instructors to work with students on an individual basis to address misunderstandings. Students attend oral assessments in groups of 5-6 and work at a board to answer scripted, conceptual questions. The facilitator asks the initial scripted questions as well as follow-up probing questions and encourages students to work together.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants can be used to supplement the instructor and/or Teaching Assistant during recitations. They may help facilitate productive group work on tutorial activities designed to help students develop conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. In this example, we describe the use of Learning Assistants to support tutorials within recitation in two introductory science courses physics and chemistry.

Learning Assistants are used to facilitate student discussion in peer instruction during clicker questions (i.e., classroom response systems), by asking Socratic questions, emphasizing reasoning, and probing student thinking.

A presentation of the benefits and potential uses for Padlet collaborative boards in the classroom.

This activity provides a complete curriculum for teaching the photoelectric effect using the PhET Photoelectric Effect simulation in a large-lecture modern physics course. It includes links to powerpoint slides for two to three 50-minute lectures using Peer Instruction with clickers, and one homework assignment suitable for an online homework system. Research has demonstrated that students in classes using this curriculum have a better understanding of the photoelectric effect than students in classes using traditional instruction supplemented by a computerized tutor.

Labs and tutorials that use equipment such as circuits can be modified to use PhET simulations instead. Research shows that substituting the PhET Circuit Construction Kit simulation for real equipment in a variety of contexts leads to improved conceptual learning in the best cases, and the same conceptual learning in the worst cases. There are many advantages to using PhET simulations over real equipment: They are easy to use, so students can play around and modify the experiment quickly and easily without fear of breaking the equipment. They have productive constraints to focus attention on the most important aspects of the experiment (e.g. bulb brightness and current flow) rather than on irrelevant aspects (e.g. wire color and length). Finally, if real equipment is not available, PhET simulations provide the opportunity to do multiple experiments with a single piece of equipment: a computer.

These labs provide examples of using very open-ended questions to guide students in exploring a simulation and designing their own experiments. These labs can lead to a high level of quantitative thinking about data analysis.

Looking to help students practice "reading" images for a variety of contextual meanings while engaging in content area study? This lesson uses images of the Boston Massacre to deepen students' comprehension of both the event and the effects of propaganda. Students begin by completing an anticipation guide to introduce them to Boston Massacre, propaganda, and British/colonial reactions to the massacre. They then complete an image analysis to make inferences about various images of the massacre. The culminating activity-a presentation about students' observations and inferences-demonstrates students' knowledge of the Boston Massacre and propaganda in a variety of ways. This lesson benefits English-language learners (ELLs) and struggling readers because it involves viewing images, participating in discussions, working with peers, and listening to a read-aloud that reinforces the lesson content and vocabulary.

In this individual research project, a senior thesis student conducts a regression analysis that explores whether high school GPA or standardized test scores are better predictors of the cumulative GPAs of college graduates at her own university. The data are easily obtainable from the Office of Institutional Research. The project can be modified to be a group research project in a Research Methods Class or a Special Topics Upper Level Economics class.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants have been used to facilitate group work in a variety of ways, such as in-lecture tutorials and worksheets, group work in required recitations, and group work in optional co-seminars. This page describes some of these various ways that Learning Assistants can be used to help make a course more interactive.

Rather than have a purpose, unstructured play is child-led, often leading to play that is creative and improvised. This article discusses the importance of unstructured play and gives tips on how to help children get this most our of unstructured playtime.

Video clips from federal and regional agencies show scientists at work with tools used to collect data about the climate and weather. This article, from the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, will help students visualize the tools and how they are used in the atmosphere, at sea, and other hard-to-access locations.

As educators move back into their classrooms socially distanced, in hybrid environments, or entirely virtual, our methodology must change. It’s crucial, though, that progressive, human-centered pedagogy is not lost. Districts have extended harmful practices into digital space intent on controlling and surveilling learning and behavior, even if that digital space terminates in a student’s bedroom. As humane educators, we must resist this systemic inertia and build an empathetic and tolerant space to work alongside students rather than against them. In this handbook, you will find twenty elements of progressive pedagogy outlined with specific methods of carrying them out.

This handbook is meant, in part, to resolve the “how” of human-centered pedagogy, offering tools and websites to structure engaged learning for our students. In the same vein, we must push back against carceral practices invading our schools: student tracking software, forcing webcams to be on and surveilling student screens, centering anti-cheating rationales, suspending students, or enforcing dress codes. Now, more than ever, educators must demand that students are treated with respect and demand respect for our profession, as market forces attempt to capitalize on a pandemic to dismantle public education.