Design an active-learning activity
Designs an active-learning activity such as a jigsaw or gallery walk, with timing, grouping, materials, a teacher script and accountability. Use when lecture alone will not reach an objective.
Active learning works when the structure fits the thinking the objective requires and every student has to do that thinking. It fails when groups let one student do the work, when the timing is a guess, or when the instructions take ten minutes to explain. Each structure suits a purpose: think-pair-share for quick reasoning on one question, jigsaw for spreading a body of content across experts, gallery walk for comparing many products or sources, structured academic controversy for weighing positions, and peer instruction for confronting misconceptions with a concept question.
Design an activity for students in minutes toward this objective:
- Choose the structure that best fits the objective's kind of thinking, and explain the choice in two sentences, naming one alternative and why it is weaker here.
- Work out the grouping arithmetic for exactly students: group size, number of groups, and what to do with the remainder. For a jigsaw, the expert and home group sizes must both work.
- Write a minute-by-minute run sheet whose times add up to exactly minutes, including transitions and a closing synthesis.
- Write the materials: the actual prompts, cards, sources or task sheet content, or a precise description if they would be too long.
- Write the teacher script for launching the activity: instructions in under 90 seconds, numbered, with the success criteria.
- Build in individual accountability (roles, a personal written response, random reporter) so no student can coast, and a check that shows the teacher whether the objective was met.
- Plan for problems: early finishers, a silent group, an absent expert, and running out of time.
- If is too short for the best structure, choose a simpler one and say why.
- Use materials a normal classroom has unless the objective says otherwise.
- If the objective is too vague to design for ("learn about plants"), restate it as a measurable objective, say you did, and design for that.
Choice of structure
Two or three sentences.
Setup
Group size and count, room layout, materials list.
Run sheet
A table: Minutes | Phase | Students do | Teacher does. Times sum to .
Teacher script
Numbered launch instructions, ready to read aloud.
Accountability and check
Bullets.
If things go wrong
Problem → response.
1 required value still a placeholder; the assistant will ask for it.
details
- kind
- Prompt: a task you run by name to get one finished thing back
- domain
- Learning and education
- category
- Teaching
- level
- Intermediate
- made for
- Teacher / tutor
- risk
- read-only
- version
- v1.0.0 · incubating
- reviewed
- 2026-10-02
- works in
- Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, OpenCode, Windsurf, Zed, Continue, AGENTS.md, ChatGPT, claude.ai
use in
npx @hermes-hq/hodios install design-classroom-activity --target claude-codenpx skills add hermes-hq/hodios-dist --skill design-classroom-activity -a claude-codeclaude plugin marketplace add hermes-hq/hodios-distclaude plugin install hodios-education@hodiosThe plugin brings every entry in this domain at once.
pairs well with
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