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Active Learning Lesson Plan
Think-Pair-Share to Practice Problem Solving
Objective – Analyze component parts of a clinical case study to determine the level of neurological lesions.
Setting – Lecture session with 35 students
Think
Have the students sort into pairs at the beginning of the lesson. Students will receive a handout with a case study and a series of questions that the students will have to answer about every case study they will review for the semester. This would be an introductory lesson; the case must be simple but include all of the elements in more difficult problems. The students should receive a short introduction on the parts of a case study. The questions at the end should be scaffolded to help students think backwards from the clinical function described towards the underlying anatomical structures.
Pair
Give the students 10 minutes to review the case and commit answers to each question. Give each group a clean copy of the case handout and give the students another 10 minutes to share their answers from the questions and prompt the groups that they will have to give a short report out about their answers and how they solved the problem.
Share
During the report out session, early focus can be on correct answers for the questions. Emphasis should continue on how groups arrived at their answers and sharing the process used to determine anatomy from function. During the sharing, the instructor should facilitate explanations of how the problem was solved in the groups, not whether answers are correct.
Justification – This is a fairly safe way to introduce students to problem solving as a process instead of answer driven. There are several checkpoints along the way where students will learn that their answers are wrong, but instead of just learning what the correct answer is, there is still time for hearing how other people processed the problems.
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