New Teaching Strategy - Not really New !

One of the less traditional teaching strategies that I used in some of my classes over the past three years is the subject of this post, but I don’t have a name for it.

This is how it goes: I select some of the course topics, assign one topic to every group of students, the students research the topic with an objective in mind, that is, prepare a lesson on the topic for their classmates with all the necessary illustration material and supporting exercises. The students then deliver the lesson to the rest of the class and sometimes I assess them on the outcomes based on a marking scheme like the one below:

Criteria	Max mark
Lesson Plan	5 marks
1.       Clearly outlines the lesson objectives	1
2.       Clearly defines lesson parts	2
3.       Clearly defines duration allocated for each lesson part	1
4.       Clearly defines the ownership of the lesson part	1
Presentation	5 marks
1.       Camtasia recording	1
2.       Visually appealing and clear points to understand	1
3.       Covers topic in a reasonable amount of details	2
4.       References Slide	1
Demo	5 marks
1.       Relevant and clear scenario	1
2.       Student’s competency level with the delivered topic	4
Exercise	5 marks
1.       Relevant to the lesson objectives	1
2.       Simple scenario with very clear instruction	1
3.       Provide limited help to students while trouble shooting	3
Total	20 marks

In other occasions, I may have this as simply a formative class activity with no allocation of marks. I tried this teaching strategy with technical courses, reference the marking scheme above, as well as theoretical courses, like MIS. For theoretical courses, the duration given to the group to present is shorter than the practical courses in nature. Either way, students always found the method interesting and a nice routine breaker.

Now that I told you all about my innovative teaching strategy, I would like to invite you fellow blog viewer to help me give it a nice name … criteria: please make it sound like rocket science!