Group Projects
[Dirk assigned his students to work in groups of two, research a topic of interest, and present results to the class. He scheduled one or two presentations at the beginning of each section meeting.] I can’t stress enough how important it is for students to get immediate feedback on their talks. I did 5 minutes with the group at the end of class where we would discuss the presentation. Anything longer than that and they tend to forget what they did, which I would do as well if the feedback took a week.
By Dirk Fabian (8/99)
I tried this too, and liked the results in general. I would definitely suggest limiting the groups to two people; I had three to five in each group and the presentations ended up taking way too long. I also tried to get feedback (both positive and negative) from the class after each presentation, but the students were very reluctant to do this. I still think it would be nice to know how the other students liked the presentations, but maybe anonymous responses would work better.
By Jennifer Hoffman (9/99)