Doctor Janet Rankin, who’s responsible for the course “Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering” at MIT, is an expert in Active Learning techniques and describes the beach ball technique very clearly. If you are willing to try it, you can download the template from the link below and think about a set of question you would like to start with, during one of your lessons, and then get familiar with the technique before going directly to the improvisation part: you might discover that sometimes letting students go with their own questions and answers could bring new contributions and new stimuli to your lesson! Encourage students to let go with shyness and reluctance toward a more spontaneous and dynamic approach. The timing of this activity depends on your objectives: be sure to set it properly and check it in order to keep the activity short, because you’ll need some time for the debriefing of results.

" ", by MIT OpenCourseWare, is licenced under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Click on the image below to download the template of this activity.

beach ball template