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Best Practices: Class Demonstrations Bring Broadway to Your Classroom

Imagine what it would be like to sit in a student’s seat and see a group of your students act out an equation, a poem, or a chemical reaction. The visual demonstration of a concept, theory, or process requires students to see the process, solve the problem, or critique the encounter. It taps higher-order thinking skills and four to six intelligences, plus it can resuscitate a dead topic or pump life into boring content.

Wait. Music would help. Six men and six women students prepare to enter. On cue, the women walk to the front of the room to “I’m Every Woman” or “All That Jazz” from Chicago with white gloves; then the men jog down to “Bad Boys” or “Gonna Fly Now” from Rocky with hooded sweatshirts. Finally, a single woman walks down to “All by Myself.” The class is laughing and on the edges of their seats, which is just where you want them.

A dozen students are lined up across the front of the room with one student on the side. Now they walk through the mathematical process for multiple or logistic regression analysis. The 12 potential predictor students and the single criterion student provide visual representations of the relationships between variables and how predictors are selected. The class thinks through the process by choosing the top three predictors in order. A quantitative presentation follows, which is anchored conceptually in the visual demo.

Published in:

Published In

April, 2008


Thriving in Academe
  • anc_dyn_linksHumor and the Net Generation
  • anc_dyn_linksTales from Real Life: Searching for Your Undergird
  • anc_dyn_linksTechniques that Connect with Net Geners
  • anc_dyn_linksBest Practices: Class Demonstrations Bring Broadway to Your Classroom
  • anc_dyn_linksIssues to Consider: Discovering Your “Undergird”
  • anc_dyn_linksReferences & Resources

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