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So I didn’t do too much in class on Friday. This was because I felt that if we were taking a day to do active learning, it should be as active as possible, with as little from me as possible. I tried to slip entirely into a facilitator role.

Some noted that physical things are easy to make active, because people can do them. That’s true. But you can take different approaches to how to make them active, and you can still get ideas from how people teach things that are physical. For example, the knit-and-pass exercise could work just as well for translating in a group, teaching synonyms for search, or any brainstorming activity. The yoga-poses teaching demonstrated how to teach something kinesthetically that could have been taught with flashcards. You could have people pose as a painting is drawn, or act out scenes of literature to learn them.

My plan, for this class, was also to show how once you’re thinking from an active learning perspective you incorporate several types of techniques easily, iwthout necessarily thinking “theory X would recommend teaching method Y.”