"My own capacity to listen widely, generously, and attentively becomes my resistance."  Sherri Spelic

In an anxious, sound-saturated world, a few minutes of silence is the space students need to think. While it is ideal to pause for 12 seconds to allow a group to respond to a question, we instead wait about 1.2 seconds. Allowing this mental space is not just a kindness to our students: It can be the difference in whether students remember and apply what they have learned. Our brain needs time to process information and make connections to prior knowledge.

Another form of pause is listening: When are we really listening to students, giving them our full attention without sifting their response for the answer we anticipate? How often are students prompted to listen to each other, and how do we teach them to listen deeply?

This teaching tip offers four places to start, from simple strategies to thinking more deeply about listening as radical action.

Reflect on to whom we and our students are listening

Listening is an intentional act of those we give respect, priority, and value to, and "How well or how poorly we listen often reflects the value we place on the messenger in a given context." In “Listening as Resistance,” Sherri Spelic writes about what it means to listen, how we listen in the texts we read and then the choices we make about who we follow on social media and which publications we consult to interpret an event. Rather than just tuning into the voices with the most intellectual expertise or most resources, she writes in bold, "I listen to people who have skin in the game." 

Reflect on who students listen to based on your curriculum and course design: texts, podcasts, videos, blogs, social media, guest speakers. Do these prioritize individuals or groups? Do students get a chance to listen to different aural voices rather than only through the voice students generate while reading? Are we willing to bring in nontraditional media, voices, and perspectives, such as those “who have skin in the game”? In our own professional development, are we committed to listening to new voices? 

Begin and end with reflective silence

If you facilitate live class sessions, open class with reflective silence. You could prompt students to close their eyes, recognize the things that currently occupy their thoughts, pause them or let them go for the time being, and invite focus to the course. (For online sessions, you could encourage students to turn off their cameras and mute their mics for this part.) 

This opening silence can also be structured by asking students to write a two-sentence review from the previous class session, a review of what they learned in their assignments leading up to class, or what they anticipate they will learn in the class ahead.

At the end of class, reserve five minutes for students to write a simple reflection of what they learned (which has been called a one-minute paper) or remaining questions (which has been called “muddiest point”). This metacognitive act is crucial to students getting the most benefit from the learning they have done in class--switching too quickly can cause much of that learning activity to melt away.

In asynchronous online courses, write these prompts at the beginning of lessons or class messages, and have students share their opening and closing reflections in a Google Doc, Q & A Moodle forum, or Padlet.

Opt students to Pause and Write

This teaching tip offers strategies for intentional pauses throughout the class period, from committing to longer pauses after posing a question to the class to using discussion and activity lulls to bring students back to writing. These strategies help students who need or want to think through an answer (an introvert quality) rather than think as they respond (an extrovert quality).

Prioritize listening in student discussions

In her work with indigenous educators in Alaska, Libby Roderick facilitates professional development programs on listening in which participants practice fully listening without interjecting responses verbally or even with body language. (See the open access book  Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education.) Consider how to direct students to listen fully, such as prompting students in small groups to share responses uninterrupted and sharing out what someone else has said. In group work, emphasize the importance of coordinating group communication and including everyone’s voices rather than one’s ability to direct everyone’s work.

In asynchronous discussion forums, assign some student roles to listening, meaning rather than providing their own response, they synthesize the responses of a set group, or determine emerging themes by scanning all of the posts. Encourage them to use other students’ names and quote them directly or indirectly. 

References and Resources

Silence in Discussion? Pause and Write: Teaching Tip

Pauses Make Learning Visible with Melissa Wehler (audio: 60 minutes), from the ThinkUDL Podcast. December 2020.

Read her accompanying article Pause, Play, Repeat: Using Pause Procedure in Online Microlectures (3-minute read), plus many other resources included in the podcast link above.

Indigenous Ways of Teaching, Learning & Being with Libby Roderick (audio: 64 minutes), from the ThinkUDL Podcast. December 2020.

Merculieff, I., & Roderick, L. (2013). Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education (free PDF of book). University of Alaska Anchorage.

See also the partner book Start Talking: A Handbook for Engaging Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education.

Morris, S. M., & Friend, C. (2020). Listening for Student Voices (7-minute read). Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection. Hybrid Pedagogy Press.

Spelic, S. (2018, June 28). Listening as Resistance (5-minute read). She spoke on this topic on the View from Venus podcast (episode: 20 minutes). This piece and others included in her book Care at the Core: Conversational Essays on Identity, Education and Power. 

About the Author

Christina Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric. This semester she is teaching the University as Science Fiction for the Honors College.   Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

Blog originally published in 2021.

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Most study techniques focus on memorizing information. The Feynman Technique flips that script: students learn by explaining, transforming complex ideas into clear, teachable language that reveals real understanding. Developed by Nobel laureate in Physics Richard Feynman, the Feynman Technique is a four-step, student-centered approach to mastering complex material. It serves as an effective active learning strategy, particularly in clinical education or other areas in which there is a high level of complexity to the course content or particular concepts requiring application of knowledge.

Four Steps to the Feynman Technique 

1. Pick a topic to learn: Identify a concept you would like to learn more about and write down anything you may already know. Use a pencil and piece of paper or digital tool to write down preexisting thoughts before going deeper into the topic. Do some research and learn anything you did not previously know.
2. Write about it, as if explaining to someone: Now that you have your topic and some more information, you are going to write about the concept as if you are explaining it to someone who knows nothing. Do not leave out any important details and consider what you learned from doing research. Even better, find a person or pretend there is an imaginary audience to inform on your topic. 
3. Determine where there are gaps in knowledge: Remove any weaknesses or shaky interpretations in your knowledge. Go back to the source material and review, re-read, and re-learn if needed. Turn the areas of weakness into a strong defence for what you know about the topic. 
4. Simplify language and add analogies: Ideally, you have become close to an expert on the target skill. This step makes the study material more cohesive and whole. Consider teaching a young child or someone with no prior knowledge on the subject. Break-down hard to understand words and provide analogies or an infographic to supply a varied learning approach. 

Its Functionality for Studying a Topic 

There are many benefits to utilizing this technique in a study session:

• Fill-in knowledge gaps: The Feynman technique identifies gaps early on and allows you to fill them in through steady progress.
• Improved communication: Understanding a concept in your head is one thing, but knowing how to explain an extensive concept to someone else in simple terms changes the playing field (refer to Student Feedback at the end).
• Retention of information: By actively reviewing and repeatedly explaining concepts, the knowledge becomes committed to memory. In contrast, with rote memorization, the comprehension fades quickly.
• Increased confidence: Knowing you put in effort to learn a new concept will boost your self-esteem and help you appear more studious.

An Example from a Graduate-Level Nursing Course

After completing the four-steps, the Feynman technique can then be used as a scaffold for group presentations, clinical teaching, or collaborative class discussions during which students can exchange ideas and insight on the topic. The process also facilitates deeper understanding through self-assessment and reflection. Because of its flexibility, the Feynman technique is easily adaptable to a variety of teaching modalities and aligns well with competency-based and case-based learning approaches.

One example, from a graduate-level nursing course, has students choose a specific pediatric disease or condition they would like to learn more about and prepare a summary of their current knowledge of their topic. Students then utilize course materials and survey the peer-reviewed literature to fill the gaps in their knowledge and write a brief (1-2 page, single-spaced) summary that includes key components of their chosen disease/condition.

Utilizing GoReact, an online performance-based learning platform, students record and submit a video presentation of their summary following the instructions and rubric provided within the platform. The presentations on their topic are then refined for two different audiences – healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers – requiring them to condense their written and verbal presentation of complex material to reflect the unique characteristics of each audience. Students once again record each presentation, complete a self-assessment and reflection, and provide/receive peer feedback. 

Conclusion

Informed by the Feynman technique, this active-learning assignment engages students in an iterative process that promotes progressive mastery of a concept or topic. Through cycles of summarization of information, refinement of written and verbal communication, self-assessment, reflection, and peer feedback, students expand and deepen their understanding of complex course concepts, enhance their writing and presentation skills, and gain experience presenting complex information to unique audiences. 

Student Feedback

“I learned a lot of new information about the disorder throughout this process.”

“Overall, I felt that this summary was challenging but not overbearing. It helped me gain a better understanding of this condition while also allowing me to work on my presenting skills and research.”

“I thought this was really interesting and helped me understand more of the condition. I felt this assignment was useful in diving deeper into individual topics.”

“I really enjoyed recording my own summary. I really feel like the act of summarizing and explaining it to others makes knowledge truly absorb.”

“I found this valuable as I was able to practice communicating as a future nurse practitioner.”

References and Resources

Cam. (2020, August 7). The Feynman Technique. University of Colorado Boulder.

Computer Systems Institute. (2021, December 22). The Feynman technique: The best learning method you've never heard of before. https://www.csinow.edu/career-tips/the-feynman-technique-the-best-learning-method-youve-never-heard-of-before/

Hey, J. (2023, May 28). The Feynman learning technique. Sketchplanations. https://sketchplanations.com/feynman-learning-technique

Reyes, E., Blanco, R., Doroon, D., Limana, J., & Torcende, A. (2021). Feynman technique as a heutagogical learning strategy for independent and remote learning. Recoletos Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 9(2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.32871/rmrj2109.02.06

Thomas, F. (2021, August 30). How to Use the Feynman Technique to Learn Faster (With Examples). College InfoGeek. 

(2021, April 13). The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

(2019). Learn Faster with the Feynman Technique. Bucknell Teaching and Learning Center. (2020). 

Save and adapt a Google Doc version of this teaching tip.

About the Authors

Peg Kennedy is an Assistant Professor and Student Success Coach in the School of Nursing at OU. Her academic interests include nursing student success; interpersonal and childhood trauma, violence, and maltreatment; resilience in trauma-exposed youth; multidisciplinary collaboration in healthcare; and trauma-informed approaches to practice and education. Outside of the classroom, Peg enjoys spending time with her family, camping, and hanging out with her goldendoodle, Chloe.

Emma Sikora is a senior at Oakland University majoring in Professional and Digital Writing. She is an Editorial Assistant Intern with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Her role within the organization consists of maintaining a teaching blog, performing administrative tasks, and community outreach to contributors. She has taken on tasks within various student organizations such as leadership roles or volunteer work.

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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Boosting student engagement and fostering genuine discussions can be a significant challenge. Like many instructors, I experienced the common pitfalls of traditional discussion forums: students often posted minimal, last-minute responses, or simply "lurked" without truly engaging with the material or their peers. Even in-class discussions were often dominated by a few vocal students, leaving others on the sidelines and limiting the diversity of perspectives. This uneven engagement hindered the deep, meaningful conversations essential for developing critical thinking and application skills in my ORG3310 course, an undergraduate core course in Human Resource Management (HRM).

To address these challenges, I sought a more interactive and student-centered learning environment. Breakout Learning, an AI-powered platform designed to shift traditional discussions into dynamic, team-based experiences, offered a compelling solution. My core idea was to shift from passive asynchronous forums to real-time voice interactions. My experience using this platform has shown how its AI-driven analytics and structured activities can move students beyond passive participation to create truly collaborative learning experiences in hybrid or fully online courses.

How to Employ Breakout Learning in Your Course

Designing Custom Discussions
Each week, I created discussion prompts tailored to that week’s topic. These weren't generic prompts, but structured, collaborative exercises such as debates on HR policies, brainstorming future trends in recruitment, or analyzing real-world case studies. While it took some upfront effort, it allowed for deeper engagement with core HR concepts and helped students connect theory to real-world challenges. I found that the flexibility of the platform made it easier to design discussions that felt relevant and discipline-specific. For example, I designed a multi-segment activity where students first identified problems with an existing system, then they practiced a related skill in a role-play, and finally worked together to create a new solution. This ability to build a discussion with progressive steps can transform a single topic into a dynamic learning experience.

Integrating Multimedia Resources
To enrich the discussions and bring in a range of perspectives, I embed relevant multimedia resources—readings, podcasts, and videos—directly within the platform for students to engage with as pre-work. This allowed students to come prepared and grounded the conversation in a shared understanding.

Facilitating Structured Interactions
Instead of posting individually in a forum, students engage in live, spoken online discussions (see Student Feedback quotes at the end). These peer-led conversations are structured, guiding small groups of students through a series of questions or simulated exercises. This approach, inspired by the Socratic method and scenario-based learning, ensures everyone has the opportunity to contribute. It moves beyond passive reading and encourages a deeper level of engagement as students actively debate ideas and apply relevant concepts in real-time.

Leveraging AI for Personalized Feedback & Insights                                            
After each discussion, students received immediate, individualized feedback reports assessing the quality of their contributions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. This personalized feedback helps them reflect on their performance, identify areas for improvement, and refine their critical thinking and communication skills (see Student Feedback quotes at the end). 

Utilizing Student Q&A Summaries                 
One key benefit is that the platform compiles end-of-discussion questions into summary reports, helping me quickly spot confusion and adapt my teaching to support student learning more effectively.

Automated Assessment Support 
The platform offers flexible automated scoring. The AI can provide a score based on the quality of a student’s contributions, but the instructor can also incorporate other data points like attendance, completion time and quiz scores to create a more comprehensive assessment. While I review all grades and adjust them as needed, this feature streamlines the assessment process and provides transparent insights into student performance.

Conclusion

Integrating Breakout Learning into my course has significantly increased student engagement and fostered deeper critical thinking. The platform's ability to create a more inclusive, engaging, and collaborative learning environment has transformed what were once passive interactions into dynamic, structured dialogues. While designing tailored prompts requires initial effort, the ability to customize discussions, combined with the AI-driven feedback and instructor analytics, has made a profound difference in my classroom. This experience has reinforced my belief that the most impactful discussions are a result of intentional design and active facilitation, where the technology used can play a role in guiding the learning process.

Student Feedback on Breakout Learning:

“Breakout learning is the most unique thing I've ever done in any class” 

“Real time discussion is far more engaging than forum posts” 

“I found it most valuable to be able to actually speak to other classmates in real time. You are able to have more of a discussion and go back and forth with each other. We cannot do that in the Moodle forums.”

“Don’t force students to talk even if they have nothing to say" 

"I don’t like being graded by AI"

References and Resources

Brunton, R., MacDonald, J., Sugden, N., & Hicks, B. (2022). Discussion forums: A misnomer? Examining lurkers, engagement and academic achievement. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 38(5), 27-44.

Fehrman, S., & Watson, S. L. (2021). A systematic review of asynchronous online discussions in online higher education. American Journal of Distance Education, 35(3), 200-213.

Onesi-Ozigagun, O., Ololade, Y. J., Eyo-Udo, N. L., & Ogundipe, D. O. (2024). Revolutionizing education through AI: a comprehensive review of enhancing learning experiences. International Journal of Applied Research in Social Sciences, 6(4), 589-607.

About the Author

Hanna Kalmanovich-Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Department of Management & Marketing. Her academic interests include employee well-being, power dynamics, and remote work, and she is always looking for innovative ways to enhance student engagement in her courses. She presented this idea at the 2025 Teaching & Learning Symposium. She teaches introductory classes in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management as well as advanced topics like Managing Total Rewards and Negotiations. Outside the classroom, Hanna practices negotiation daily—with three kids keeping her on her toes. She loves traveling and making the most of family time.

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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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 2025 Teaching Awards to share their Teaching in 10 Words, plus a little more on those 10 words. 

How would you sum up your teaching in 10 words? Fill out the Teaching in 10 Words form to share your short teaching statement.

Try New Things

Jeffrey Insko, Teaching Excellence Award

“I try all things,” says Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “I achieve what I can.” “I am only an experimenter,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Circles,” “I unsettle all things.” I’m not much for dispensing pedagogical advice, but I think you could do worse than to approach the enterprise in the spirit of Melville and Emerson. Learning— and teaching, too— is fundamentally a matter of finding out what you don’t know. That can be risky and discomfiting— but also rewarding. So try new things, ask students to try new things, refuse the transactional model of education. Some experiments will fail, but they will be good failures. Emerson (again) said it best: “People [students, teachers] wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Turn Off Automatic Pilot

Randall Engle, Excellence in Teaching Award

Each new class session, each new semester, each new year, turn off automatic pilot.  It’s easy to warm up leftovers, but students crave something fresh and meaty.  Challenge yourself to new insights, approaches, and methodologies and students’ participation will move from bland to animated. Before stepping into the classroom, I tell myself that I am not a “talking head” who is there to mete out facts, but I am an archaeologist who has just returned from a dig with unearthed, priceless treasure:  I’m excited to tell my students about the find! I share its value, why it matters; and if you have something to say, delivery takes care of itself. If the connections take, it means that knowledge has become alive, and learning feels animated and crisp––with “every step an arrival,” says Rilke. Turning off automatic pilot can be one of the most animating things you can do.

Inspire curiosity with memorable learning experiences in an engaging, inquiry-driven community.

Suzanne Spencer-Wood, Online Teaching Excellence Award

Students call my teaching passionate, inspirational and even electric! Several students said my belief in their abilities is inspirational, as I teach students to learn using scientific research and study methods. I inspire curiosity and critical thinking by creating a questioning learning community and showing students the joy and fun of learning surprising new insights about our world. I structure lectures around a logical series of ever-deeper questions to stimulate discussions. Further, I created many hands-on learning experiences, service-learning research projects, and field trips for students to learn by doing.  I show videos to stimulate discussion because recent neuroaesthetics research found that viewing beautiful landscapes, sites or artifacts stimulates hormones that increase attention, emotional engagement, and therefore motivation, memory and learning. My teaching embodies research findings that students are motivated to learn by being truly seen, respected, cared about and valued, through active listening to student contributions to discussions.

Image by Madeline Shea, created for CETL. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC

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Midterm evaluations bring a host of institutional measures to reach out to struggling students, such as grade reports. What might make the most difference to students’ success in the course is to enable them to assess their own performance in the class, set goals, and provide questions and feedback to the instructor accordingly. Even if you make all grades available on Moodle, students can see their grades but often don’t check or acknowledge that these grades are available to them (since not every professor will provide these grades automatically).

Therefore, about a third of the way through the semester, I assign students a short Progress Report journal activity as a Moodle assignment, in which they:

• Report their overall grade in the course.
• Report their attendance record (since attendance is required in our course).
• Reflect on their performance, whether it meets their expectations.
• Provide goals for the rest of the course (often in the form of a GPA).
• Provide feedback and questions for me on the class in general.

Students take anywhere from 50 to 400 words to complete this journal, based on their needs. While we may consider ourselves open to student feedback, students often interpret the Progress Report Journal as their first opportunity to reflect on the course and ask questions. Some will provide context for their content knowledge and other school responsibilities, which is often very enlightening for me. Students generally express gratitude at the official opportunity to assess their progress in the course (even more so when they recognize they’re not yet meeting their goals) because it is early enough in the semester to make progress. Even with brief feedback on the instructor’s part, they see the professor reaching out and caring about each individual student.

Even in the case of students with critical feedback or reporting negative experiences, it provides an opportunity for the instructor to show understanding and explain course procedure, more effectively mitigating grumblings and increasing course satisfaction. This feedback is also an opportunity to improve our courses and correct mistakes.

Even for classes with around 50 students, this activity would not take long for the tremendous benefit it provides to the class dynamic, student success, and your end-of-the-semester evaluations. Not all submissions require a response, but it is an opportunity to reach out to students who are below satisfactory performance.

About the Author

Christina Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric. This semester she is teaching the University as Science Fiction for the Honors College.  

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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