First Orientation session resulted in success!

Today is the orientation! We have two sessions scheduled and the first session has just finished. The active learning activity seemed to go over very well from my perspective, although I did not do an assessment for this session. The group activity asked that they each take a database, explore it, and then teach it to the group. This is something I've traditionally been afraid of handing over to active learning exercises because I worry that not all the information will be covered, that students will not want to participate, that the class will find it dull...but in truth, this happens when I lecture anyway because it's less engaging. The handouts to guide what they were exploring in each database were key to giving each resulting presentation structure. During the group work time, I observed so many peer-to-peer teaching moments! Additionally, the types of questions I was getting from each group were targeted and motivated by the students' curiosity, not my instructor-imposed questions. One group showed advanced features and coupled it with why it's helpful to use from a student perspective. I am in awe. I know intellectually that active learning exercises based on a constructivist approach to learning that embraces different learning styles is effective but I've never had the courage to give up the power of the instructor. There were some problems. I had one group discuss logging on from off-campus and unfortunately, because the semester hasn't officially started, none of them could log on. Additionally, the instructor computer that the groups were using to present from was very slow. I feel an assessment component would reveal any other weaknesses from a student perspective. In the second session, I will do a soft assessment to gather feedback. I can say without a doubt that this session was light years of my usual lecture-based orientation. I feel like the students actually walked away with some sort of intellectual benefit, which I could never be sure of from my lecture-based style. I am a little worried about the second session, however. In the past, I've come up with activities that seemed to work very well in one session that simply flopped in another. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the second session goes as well as the first!