Grad School Class -Active Learning Strategies

As many teacher do I signed up for a grad school class for this fall.  This one credit class is being offered right in my district so I will not have to travel and some of my colleagues took it last year and raved on how they were able to use it right away in their classroom.  With that type of reviews how could I not sign up for it.  I did have to let the instructor know right away that the second night of class I would miss because I have a meeting for our Transcripted credit class at FVTC (then I also found out it was my son's open house, plus I was also scheduled to work a sporting event).  Talk about being overbooked.  I did find someone to take my sporting event duty {THANK YOU}  and I should finish my meeting in time to attend the open house.

I had the first meeting September 22 and it made my head spin.  good information but I had a hard time coming up with how to make it work for my classroom.  I asked questions and I got some assistance and advice on how to work it in a high school setting.

I was in class for 3 hours and then I promptly went to my room to try to incorporate some of those ideas into my classroom for the next day.  It took me from 8 to 11 p.m. but I pulled together two activities to use the next morning.  Now the activities were not that elaborate that it took me three hours, but I was also able to accomplish some other upcoming responsibilities.  I will save that for another post.

the two activities I did were numbered list.  I have the students the 7 steps to recording an accounting transaction.  These steps were cut into slips and as a group of 4 students had to put them in order and tell my why they choose that order.  I will admit that what I thought was the "right" order was disputed by the students thought process.  I agreed that what they had could be correct because they defended their thought process.  I liked seeing the students work in groups and it appears they enjoyed doing some moving and collaborating in a non-evaluated sense.

The second activity I did was a think pair share.  Two students worked on classifying a TAccount and then shared their Taccount with another pair of students and the groups had to agree or disagree with each other.  I did not have as much buy in from this activity but it was good to get them thinking out loud so I could hear what they know from accounting.