A Teaching Sandwich Approach to Integrating Classroom and Practical Teaching

A novel and innovative approach to delivering practical teaching has been adopted by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield (UoS) to accommodate rapidly increasing student numbers. The new approach provides pedagogical advantages for the students and efficiency advantages for the faculty but exacerbates the potential for the practical teaching to be isolated from the theoretical classroom teaching. Proposed here is the use of a “teaching sandwich”, created by scheduling the practical activity between the theoretical lecture and an applied tutorial class. In addition the students were asked to perform two online exercises during their self-directed study time, either side of the practical session. The objective of these exercises was to bridge the gap between the theoretical and laboratory based learning activities. The teaching sandwich approach has been tested on the delivery of a particular topic in a 1st year undergraduate engineering programme and the practicalities of deployment are discussed. Emergent findings show that students value the connections between lab and classroom teaching being made explicit and that the method can be used to make efficient teaching more effective.