How I teach hands-on and active classes
by Abby Noyce
How do you introduce middle-school students to neuroscience, perception, and biology? Since 2014, I’ve been teaching a hands-on class called “Hacking Flavor” for ESP Spark (25 students, 7th and 8th graders, OR 60 parents). How do you manage 25 kids, lots of activities, 15 different food samples, and still make sure learning happens? Going into this, my background in informal outreach education (I used to run field trips at a small science museum) gave me a great starting point. There’s also been some trial and error involved.
Today, I’m sharing five strategies for keeping the chaos in these classes to a minimum so that both students and teachers have a good time. Hands-on classes are really fun for students, and can be incredibly rewarding to teach, but classes that get out of hand are stressful and frustrating for all parties. With some planning and clever structure, though, these classes can run as smoothly as more-traditional lectures.
Strategy 1: Plan and Schedule
It is absolutely true that a hands-on class will require more thorough planning on the teacher’s part than a classic lecture-style class. There’s materials to prep, there’s activities to organize, and then there’s committing to a firm plan of how to use class time. I plan my hands-on classes in 5-15 minute units - nothing longer. If you’re writing down “30 minutes Activity X”, you probably haven’t thought through what needs to happen for Activity X. Here’s my schedule for Hacking Flavor the most recent time I taught it:
11:05-11:10 Intro myself and this class - things we’re going to do. Assign students into group seating if they aren’t already.
11:10-11:13 Activity: Talk to group, intro self, tell favorite and least favorite food.
11:13-11:25 Activity: Write favs and least favs on board, group observes patterns and trends.
11:25-11:35 Lecture: Overview of taste sense receptors & introduction to a bit of cellular/molecular bio.
11:35-11:50 Activity: Observe papillae. 5 mins overview/introduction, 10 mins coloring, counting, observing.
11:50-12:05 Lecture: Basic taste theory. Neural signaling and cortical processing.
12:05-12:10 Break
12:10-12:20 Activity: Salt makes sour/bitter things taste sweeter. 3 mins overview, 5 mins activity, 2 mins wrap-up.
12:20-12:25 Lecture: Intro to miracle berry.
12:25-12:35 Activity: Pass out tablets, set up food samples.
12:35-12:45 Activity: Try food samples
12:45-12:50 Groups clean up.
12:50-12:55 Whole-group discussion of miracle berry experiences - good/bad/weirdest/etc.
This schedule has a couple of things that work well. It intersperses asking students to do things and generate ideads or content with lecture-type explaining what’s going on (both in small chunks of time). It includes a break period at the 1-hour point, so that everyone can get a bathroom break and reset their brains a little bit. (Next time I teach this, I will hand each student a little water bottle for palate cleansing, and encourage them to fill the water bottles at the break as well.)
Most importantly, notice that activity set-up and clean-up are included in the schedule for the messier pieces. Those things take time - and possibly more time than you think - and need to be planned for. Then, you can rope students into assisting with them! Similarly, anything where students need to get up and come write on the board is going to take a while just for students to move around the room.
Strategy 2: Manage materials
Many hands-on classes need stuff for students to interact with. (If yours doesn’t, congratulations! You can skip this section.) With small classes, and few things to pass out, “Take one and pass the rest on” works just fine, especially if the things are easy to handle. As classes grow, or the things to distribute get weirder and messier, or you design more activities with more materials, this strategy starts to fail. It takes a lot of time, students can’t count correctly, materials get spilled, etc.
I’m a fan of creating “lab kits” whenever possible. (Credit to ESP teacher extraordinaire Zandra Vinegar for this tip.) Each student gets a ziplock bag containing supplies. For “Hacking Flavor”, this includes a plate or two, some napkins, some q-tips, a reinforcement circle sticker, a sugar packet, a salt packet, a plastic fork, and a plastic spoon. (I haven’t figured out how to lab-kit two identical-looking strips of paper, one of which is impregnated with a bitter-tasting substance and one of which is a control, which is currently the worst materials bottleneck in my class.) It takes me about twenty minutes to pack lab kits for forty students, and it parallelizes well - you can create an assembly line with one person adding plates, the next adding spoons, etc.
For materials I can’t lab-kit - things that are perishable or messy or that I don’t want students to have distracting them throughout the class - I set up stations at the front of the room and have students come get the materials. In Hacking Flavor, the climactic activity is testing a substance called “miraculin” which binds to taste receptors so that sour foods taste sweet. We sample lots of sour foods to experience this effect. I have students in groups (more about that shortly), and each group is in charge of setting up some demo foods.
As much as possible, we try to put foods into single-sample paper cups so that students can just come up and grab them. Counting past one is hard; taking one cup is easy.
One potential problem with having students come up and take samples is the development of a long queue, so that some students are done and bored before others get their supplies. For Hacking Flavor, I set up three different tables of samples, and tell students to take samples from one table at a time, go back to their seats and try them, and then come back up. It speeds up the sampling at each point, spreads out the standing in line vs. trying things, and seems to keep the room more balanced.
Strategy 3: Work in pairs or groups
I always always always have students sit in small groups for this kind of work. Peer accountability keeps them more on task, and it helps make sure everyone has a space to be involved. I find that with one-off classes during Splash or Spark, the bad group dynamics that lots of teachers worry about almost never arise. There’s not enough workload for students to feel like it’s unevenly allocated; students are self-selected and highly motivated, which helps with on-task-ness and with contributions; managing a smaller number of groups is easier than managing a larger number of individuals.
I often ask students to talk to their groups about their observations, and then to share with the larger class. The smaller conversations often go really interesting places, and give students a chance to polish and organize their thoughts before talking in front of the group. (With older students, or in a more formal setting, I’d ask them to write down their individual thoughts and observations first, then groups, then whole-class. I skip it here.) I also think that shifting their attention from teacher-lecturing to group-conversation to personal-experiences and back helps keep students tuned in and paying attention over a longer period of time, especially for younger students.
Strategy 4: One thing at a time
Give all of your instructions about an activity before students start doing the activity. If you need to give more instructions, have everybody stop, entirely, and turn their attention all the way back to you. Students can’t multitask. (Nobody can multitask...)
I try to give instructions and write numbered steps on the board. It reduces the amount of stuff students need to maintain in working memory while they are also participating in the activity. After all, I want them to be able to focus on what they are doing and experiencing in the activity! If instructions are written down, students can glance back up at the board to remember what to do next.
I find that written instructions alone aren’t adequate, at least for middle school students. I definitely need to talk through the process before turning students loose. With only written instructions, they jump ahead or don’t quite pick up on details.
Strategy 5: Structure your space
Remember that if you want students to do activities in groups at their desks, they should have desks (or tables) that can be moved (not fixed seating), and probably that have more surface area than those dinky combo chair/desk things.
Similarly, if you need desk or table space to set up materials, you want a room that is bigger than your number of students. I aim for about 25% bigger (so for a 25-student class I want a 30-35 student room).
Movable desks and tables can be moved, and so it is worth taking a few minutes to plan the layout you think will work best for your class. Remember to put them back in their original arrangement at the end, so the next teacher isn’t inconvenienced! (Students can do that rearrangement, with a little bit of instruction.) Think about how you want to lay out group work spaces relative to materials spaces. Do you need somewhere separate from those to put down your teacher supplies?
(While we’re on the topic of space, think about disposing of all your materials at the end of class. Do you need a big trash bag or two? Room trash receptacles are easily overwhelmed by the amount of waste generated by many hands-on classes.)
And that’s it! Go forth and design awesome, in-depth, hands-on classes. Your students will adore them, and you’ll have great fun.
