Jumpstart Student Engagement and Curiosity with ABC
Early in my first semester of grad school, a mentor introduced what was then a counterintuitive teaching strategy: Activity Before Content, or ABC. The strategy is simple: have students explore concepts and ideas before presenting them with new content. For example, before introducing a new concept, ask students to define it and draw from their experiences and expectations: What do they think it means? What does it remind them of? How have they encountered it in previous situations?
ABC can be used with equal impact in both face-to-face and virtual learning environments.
Why use ABC?
ABC has many advantages. Among them, it
- Engages students in active learning
- Enables students to retrieve existing information and make predictions about new information
- Provides opportunities for students to review what they know, or think they know, before piling on new information
- Creates a preliminary foundation for new content
- Encourages students to share both knowledge and questions with their peers
- Fosters a classroom community that values socially constructed knowledge
- Positions you as a collaborator and member of the classroom community, rather than a sage on the stage
How does it work?
Many familiar teaching strategies lend themselves to ABC; for example,
- Write or project a question on the board for students to answer before class begins. Using a polling application (e.g., PollEverywhere), share responses as they accrue in real-time or immediately after everyone has responded, so students can see what their classmates are thinking. As a class, discuss the responses; be sure to explore any misconceptions/outliers as well as correct responses.
- Start class with a one- or two-minute freewrite. Discuss students’ responses as a class or in small groups before sharing them out with the entire class. In online classes, leverage asynchronous discussion threads for these small group explorations.
- Create a low-stakes quiz that students complete in small groups at the beginning of class. Provide a few minutes at the end of class for groups to revisit/revise their answers after you’ve presented and discussed the content.
Once you get started, you’ll think of many more ways to pique your students’ curiosity, engage them in active learning, and create a vibrant classroom community with ABC.
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About the Author
Meg VB-Wood works in the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wyoming. She contributed this tip to a teaching tips collection gathered among the POD Network of educational developers.
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Increase Large Class Engagement with Mentimeter Polling
Engaging students in a 100-person class during a 2-hour lecture period and periodically checking their understanding is critical for student learning. Audience response systems (e.g., “clickers”) have offered a quick, simple way to achieve engagement at scale. Tools like Mentimeter not only help increase classroom engagement, it also immensely helps the instructor and the students to gauge their content delivery and level of understanding respectively, most importantly, in real time.
Polling tools are generally used to solicit anonymous, quick responses to questions displayed on a projector, which students can answer from a phone or computer. Everyone can see responses in real time, or the instructor can reveal responses once all have been submitted. While there are several polling tools such as iClickers, Kahoot, and Poll Everywhere, some of these come at a cost or have limited capacities and question formats. Mentimeter has gained popularity as providing easy mobile and computer options with fewer limitations than similar tools.
We can be creative and take advantage of a wide variety of question types and real-time results to get our students engaged in a collaborative presentation. Here are a few ways on how to use Mentimeter during your team meetings or teaching and learning activities.
- Icebreaker
- Brainstorming
- Pre-work or Asynchronous Activity
- Opinion Poll
- Think-Pair-Share
- Back Channeling
- Reflection/Feedback
- Formative Quiz/Knowledge Test
When using the basic version, there may be limitations to how many questions go in each of the presentations (created in Mentimeter); however, there are no limits on the number of presentations and there are also a variety of question formats available.
If you want to incorporate Menti questions directly on your lecture PowerPoint slides, there is an option of having a QR code or a voting link which can be used by the students and it would take them directly to the menti question. The QR code and the voting link would remain the same for the entire presentation. The weblinks for more information on how to use menti questions can be found under the References and Resources section below.
References and Resources
- Mentimeter Info
- Share QR Code - Mentimeter
- Let Your Audience Connect to the Presentation via a Link - Mentimeter
- Create an Interactive Mentimeter Quiz
- Engaging Your Audience with Mentimeter Polls
- Mentimeter- An Easy Way to Create Interactive Polls and Presentations
- Mentimeter Polling: Overview from UWE Bristol
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About the Author
Subha Bhaskaran is a Special Instructor in the Biological Sciences Department at OU. She loves teaching Human Physiology as it is always fascinating to talk about how our body functions in many ways we can’t imagine! Outside of the classroom, she volunteers at OUCARES and Nunmaan Tamil Academy.
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Early Feedback Leads to Student Success
For over a decade, our campus has promoted the use of the Faculty Feedback system as a way for faculty to share an academic concern with a student and simultaneously notify the student’s academic adviser. This year, a campus team reviewed and analyzed our past practices and created an improved Early Alert System based on the latest research. The improvements are designed to increase student engagement and performance, make the process simpler and more transparent for faculty, and make outreach more manageable for campus staff.
As an instructor, there are key and simple ways to help students achieve these five goals. For more on these five actions and concrete things you can do to increase connection and decrease stress, see the Early Alert System Faculty Role: Quick Note.
The faculty strategies in the OU Early Alert system are designed to provide support to all students in your courses, but particularly those who are struggling. By providing feedback and help early in the semester, students have the opportunity to change their behaviors in time to positively affect their performance in the course. For example,
- Arriving on time to class, asking the instructor for help, or participating more frequently
- Accessing campus resources, such as tutoring in the Academic Success Center or writing assistance in The Writing Center
- Developing new plans with their academic adviser, such as withdrawing from a course or exploring a new area of study
Thus, robust early engagement with your students through the OU Early Alert System will provide multiple opportunities for students to navigate towards success.
References and Resources
“Early Alert Systems in Higher Education” November 2014. Hanover Research.
Gump, S. “The Cost of Cutting Class: Attendance as a Predictor of Student Success”. College Teaching , Winter, 2005, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 21-26. Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Villano, R., Harrison, S., Lynch, G. Chen, G. “Linking early alert systems and student retention: a survival analysis approach”. Springer Nature 2018.
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About the Author
Kristin Landis-Piwowar is the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Accreditation. She leads and supports student success initiatives for Academic Affairs. Kristin loves to travel and take evening/night walks with flashlights (as noted by her children).
Amy Gould is the Student Success Administrator in the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at OU. Amy's career has focused on developing meaningful partnerships to meet community needs, university goals, and student learning outcomes. Amy enjoys mystery novels and snowy days.
Edited and designed by Sarah Hosch, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
100 Library Drive
Rochester, Michigan 48309-4479
(location map)
(248) 370-2751
[email protected]
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
100 Library Drive
Rochester, Michigan 48309-4479
(location map)
(248) 370-2751
[email protected]
Teaching in 10 Words
From Award-Winning OU Faculty
Expressing your teaching philosophy in 10 words can be a short but powerful way to reflect on your teaching values and practices. We asked the recipients of Oakland University’s 2022 Teaching Awards to share their Teaching in 10 Words, plus a little more on those 10 words. Learn more about the awards, which are coordinated through the Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning.
The art of asking questions: teaching science as a dialogue
Taras Oleksyk, Teaching Excellence Award
My background as an immigrant deeply influences my teaching approach, which centers on "the art of asking questions." I view learning as discipline analogous to learning a language; first comes vocabulary, then sentences, and finally dialogue. My class revolves around the scientific method aiming to separate objective reality from subjective bias. To stimulate critical thinking, I require students to participate in online Q&A forums. These platforms serve as collaborative spaces where questions fuel intellectual discussions. Answering all these questions myself is time-consuming, but it is also my way of deepening my own understanding. Indeed, nothing has taught me more about my subject than answering questions from my students. While the Q&A method has ancient roots, tracing back to the Greeks, I believe it remains the most effective way to encourage active participation and cultivate a classroom culture that celebrates diversity of thought and values each student's contributions.
Students can do hard things: building critical thinking through scaffolding
Holly Greiner-Hallman, Excellence in Teaching Award
Most of us want our students to go beyond the memorization of rote facts and into the realm of analyzing and evaluating ideas using critical thinking. Whether I am teaching Biology I or the senior capstone course, my students are expected to demonstrate scientific thinking and problem-solving skills. To push them beyond “flashcard-style” studying, I employ scaffolding: a step-wise process that moves students toward greater independence in learning. My particular brand of scaffolding involves three main components: 1.) clarity and transparency, 2.) opportunities for productive risk and failure, and 3.) modeling. When students are offered this bridge, they become less resistant to more challenging forms of thinking because it reduces anxiety, mentally prepares them for challenging concepts, and creates a warm classroom environment.
Aiming to understand why
Helena Riha, Online Teaching Excellence Award
I am originally from Slovakia, having lived there until the age of 8 and then in Oklahoma until 18, including study in France at 17. After that, I lived in Taipei and Beijing for many years and in several areas of the U.S. for college and graduate school. I became interested in the languages, people, and cultures of these places and wanted to figure out why they had the quirky characteristics I observed, including similarities and differences among them. I now teach in two disciplines, linguistics and international studies, and cover a variety of courses. I continue to pursue the understanding of why. I focus students’ attention on what and how, certainly, but we do not stop there. We probe deeper to struggle with why. Why often proves to be the most vexing question, one that takes an open mind and knowledge of the subject area to begin to comprehend.
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