After my first iteration of this guest lecture, while planning for this year I realized that there simply still was too much content I need to cover in this lesson for a single 50-minute session. Through a few discussions with my mentors about this, Stuart Sutherland (the Professor for the course) and I started to think about the possibility of breaking the lab/lecture dichotomy, a very common course structure in the sciences. As a result, we made a bold choice: we would keep the ‘homing cards’ activity for the 50-minute lecture, where all of the students could participate (essential for the activity), and we moved the latter half of the content delivery (which is examinable) to each of the two lab sections in the course during the same week. We also developed and implemented a new ‘hominids lab’, for which the lecture material was a good primer and served as an introduction.

With this new framework, the extra time provided for the ‘hominin cards’ made a huge difference. I was able to annotate the timeline component much easier and in more detail, and we had the opportunity to discuss more during the large group component of this multi-faceted jigsaw. Saving the second portion of lecture for the lab sections was also an excellent way for students to get the material necessary for higher-order agency literally minutes before applying it in the lab. As Stuart and I teach this class with a bit of a flipped format anyway (i.e., often labs are like lectures and vice versa), this was an excellent example of how removing the dichotomy not only improves student learning, but also facilitates their success when conducting high-order actions based on course content in either the lecture or lab sessions.

That being said, the downside was that I had to give the second half of the lecture two times, once for each of the lab sections. This might be a hindrance to removing the lecture/lab dichotomy for some instructors. However, it provides the opportunity for TAs or guests to teach in multiple formats if the instructor is not willing to commit the extra energy for their students.