Tip Sheet for Hands-on Teaching

Teaching Scenario Building

Hands-on activities are great for teaching and learning scenario building. Plan ahead and design the activity:

  • Write out protocols for yourself and any other instructors for the experiment or activity
  • Think ahead about safety and make sure plans and appropriate equipment are in place. Work with your institution’s safety office
  • Create a plan in advance for cleanup and waste disposal
  • Make sure that the students also write out an experiment protocol, and plan class time to go over these with them. Some questions to consider as a group:
    • Can you give us an overview of what we plan to do today?
    • What materials and equippment do we need/have?
    • What are the biggest safety considerations? (e.g., heat, burns, toxicity, moving around in a shared physical space)
    • What is our cleanup plan?

Time

  • Hands-on teaching is so much more time-consuming than you can ever imagine
  • Think about and plan minutely for the time you have in one class period
  • Be creative if possible with your institution’s course schedule — a four-hour class period is ideal
  • If possible, ask students or participants to review materials before the hands-on session (e.g., read over the historical recipe, look over representative art objects, read a related article, view a making video, come up with their own interpretation of the process, or look up key terms and materials)
  • Leave plenty of time for setup and cleanup — ideally, you should try to have your students help with both
  • Make time in class or in the lab/studio for student discussion about their experiences
  • Make time for summary discussion and formulating takeaways, which can take place at the following class meeting

Skill

The Making and Knowing Project team members were almost never expert in the hands-on activities they included in courses.

  • Accustom yourself to not being an expert, but instead, a co-learner. Explore alongside your students
  • Make sure you try the activity before you assign it
  • Have students and instructor(s) work together or in groups — use an “apprenticeship” model, ideally with participants of different skill levels
  • Work around a table or together at a bench so participants can watch each other’s process, and discuss and reflect together
  • Bring in “expert practitioners” to your class to help with unfamiliar processes. We often found that the historical processes were a learning experience for expert practitioners as well. See Expert Practitioner Tonny Beentjes’ Tutor or Student? An Expert Maker Perspective

Recording

For a full discussion of the Making and Knowing Project’s Field Notes process, please see Introduction to Field Notes

  • Recording the hands-on process is an integral part of learning and of facilitating reflection on undertaking hands-on work and one’s own experience
  • Make a template for student lab notes or field notes as a reminder for what needs to be included
  • Make sure everyone takes as detailed notes as possible on their process, perhaps by recording on their phones or phone voice-to-text programs (to be transcribed later as lab or field notes)
  • Have the students take plenty of photos and videos as they work (and integrate them later into their lab or field notes or have them create an annotated slide deck/powerpoint in place of lab/field notes)
  • Remind them to work together on recording their experience (e.g., one person can take photos while the other does a step of the process, then they can switch)
  • In addition to recording by participants, it can be really useful to have an additional person who can take photos or videos who is not actively working on the activity (but this should not take the place of participants’ own note- and photo-taking!)

Adaptation and Flexibility

  • If things don’t go as planned, it’s okay. Sometimes the best learning comes from failure, reflection, and trying again
  • Facilitate a discussion with your students about what they would want to do differently if they did the process again; what have they learned or wished they knew before?
  • This is experimental learning, so process is more important than outcome
  • Seek feedback on how to improve the activity, its flow, set up, etc. for next time

Why Devote All This Time and Effort to Hands-On Teaching?

  • We have found hands-on activities to be terrifically motivating for students (and instructors), with student creativity and enthusiasm exceeding all expectations
  • Students learn to learn in a new way
  • You and your students will ask new questions
  • New skills will humble and empower your students
  • As an instructor, you will learn much about pedagogy, embodied knowledge, yourself, and your students

Lesson Plans in the Making and Knowing Companion

The Making and Knowing Project hopes that the resources of this Companion will ease your path into the teaching of hands-on activities. We’d love to hear about your experiences. Please send any feedback to info@makingandknowing.org or opening an issue in the Research and Teaching Companion Github Issue Tracker.

  • Feel free to improvise with the Lesson Plans to fit them to your needs and resources
  • Feel free to contextualize the Lesson Plans to suit your course and its learning outcomes