- What is your learning objective for the class period? What content and skills would you like students to use on their way to accomplish this objective?
- What activities are best suited to students working in groups? Based on the number of instructional staff in your course, which activities can you effectively facilitate?
- How might you break a challenging question into smaller pieces that lead to the larger answer? How will you communicate the reasoning behind the questions to your instructional team to help them facilitate conversations with students?
- When do you want students to work in groups, when do you think they should work as individuals and when will you convene the whole class?
- How are you going to create a sense of accountability for the work that they do in class?
01Mar’22
How do you plan for SAIL Activities?
Structured activities during class time are the cornerstone of SAIL teaching practices. One of the biggest challenges of designing an activity is to achieve the right level of difficulty: you want to challenge students without overwhelming them. Being explicit with your students about the learning objectives of the activity can help them to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. You should also consider what types of activities are realistic based on the instructional support you have in your classroom.
This page includes considerations for designing activities, as well as resources and advice from faculty who have incorporated SAIL activities into their classrooms. To learn more about how other faculty are using SAIL or to be connected with other faculty using SAIL at Penn, email CETLI.
Considerations for Activity Design
Sample In-Class Activities from Penn Faculty
- Rebecca Stein of LPS, Supply and Demand Worksheet
- The worksheet demonstrates one possible way to structure a SAIL assignment with warm-up questions, the “main” question set, and some sample exam questions related to the topic.
- Phil Gressman of Mathematics, Worksheet Sample
- The worksheet clearly links the activity to the course learning goals. It also demonstrates the rationale for each section.
Advice from Penn Faculty
- Both days begin with a short lecture to complement the pre-class readings, and then students do discovery-based activities in small groups.
- One day is a lecture, and the other day is devoted to students solving problems in small groups and presenting their work on the whiteboard.
- Each activity is a series of smaller questions that lead to a larger answer. I pause the group work periodically to check in and clarify confusion.
- Students must prepare before class so they can jump right into the day’s activity. Class ends with a lecture to prime students for the next topic.
- Students read and submit questions beforehand, and then class begins with a short “just in time” lecture to answer student questions before group work.
- Groups of three work very well at round tables or in traditional classrooms.
- For groups larger than three, give each student a specific role to ensure everyone is engaged in the learning process.
- When creating groups, try to avoid groups that contain only one woman.
- Students of slightly different skill levels can be grouped together as long as the gap in skills isn’t too extreme.
- Start by assigning groups randomly and then create new groups at one or two points in the semester, once you know the students better.
- Ask students to submit responses to reading questions before class, then weave those responses into the short lecture during class.
- Use an online annotated reading tool like Perusall to make pre-class preparation more interactive. Perusall integrates with Canvas.
- Use the quiz tool in Panopto to make pre-class videos interactive. (Note that these quiz grades don’t sync to Canvas.) You can also embed Panopto videos in Canvas Quizzes, which makes it easier to edit and repurpose questions and give students a grade for this activity.
- Give students a reasonable amount of pre-class work and then have a short quiz at the beginning of class.