Let your students curate teaching material

I just fin­ished a short “speaker’s course” in 1.g (stu­dents are app. 16 ys.), where we looked at dif­fer­ent rea­son­ing tech­niques before stu­dents pre­pared and gave a speech them­selves in class.

As an intro­duc­tion I let the stu­dents share links to a video of a favorite speak­er before class in a shared Google Doc. They picked some fine examples:

 

 

Roy­al Blues:

 

(Now that I list them, it strikes me that 7 out of 8 stu­dent picked videos are Amer­i­can. Not a sin­gle Dan­ish speak­er.  I guess this also indi­cates, that Dan­ish stu­dents live in the Amer­i­can cul­tur­al hemi­sphere! — but that’s off topic…)

I haven’t left out any videos. 12 out of 20 stu­dents did­n’t share a link — maybe they could­n’t think of a speak­er or they did­n’t do their home­work. But the stu­dents who did, curat­ed con­sci­en­tious­ly. The TED video on non-ver­bal rhetorics in par­tic­u­lar was actu­al­ly good enough to show in full length.

I threw in a link to a clip from the fic­tion film “Roy­al Blues” with a less capa­ble speak­er as a contrast.

In class I played 1–2 min­utes from each video in a row , and then the stu­dents made a list of a speaker’s “do’s and don’ts” in pairs which we dis­cussed and fin­ished after­wards together.

 

Advan­tages:

• You get fresh teach­ing mate­r­i­al, that you did­n’t know of (TED)
• you get to know your stu­dents better,
• and stu­dents feel includ­ed when they influ­ence what their peers should learn from.

 

I won­der what would hap­pen if you let stu­dents curate teach­ing mate­r­i­al for a french rev­o­lu­tion course in his­to­ry… the teacher would become more of a “peer student” ?

I come to think of one of my favorite quotes on teaching:

I nev­er teach my stu­dents. I only pro­vide them with the con­di­tions in which they can learn. (Ein­stein)