In the comments section of our latest "how can we help you?" thread, Amanda asks:
Can we have a thread where we talk about different activities we do when teaching? I can use some new group work ideas. (This is similar to a past post, but I think asking this specifically might get more uptake.)
I think this is a great idea, one that might benefit new teachers, experienced teachers, and job-candidates alike. Personally, every now and then I feel like I fall into a bit of a rut as a teacher–and I've often found the experiences and wisdom of other people to be very helpful. So then, what activities do you do as a teacher? What is their pedagogical rationale, and how do the activities work?
I've experimented with a lot of different activities over the years. However, these days I've fixed in on a few types of activities:
- Discussion of student reading responses: At my university, MWF classes are 70 minutes long and TTh courses an 1:50. Because I think it's good to get students to examine the material on their own, and together as a group, each half of the class has short reading-response papers due on a different day of the week (assignments involving a targeted textual summary and brief critical discussion). We then spend the first 20-25 minutes of MWF classes, and 35-40 minutes of TTh classes, discussing students' responses, as well as reactions of other students to the reading. Although it can sometimes be difficult to get people to volunteer (and I do sometimes call on people regardless), on the whole I find it works really well. It requires students to show up prepared, and often gives rise to good and unexpected discussions that might not have arisen otherwise.
- Daily group assignment w/bonus competition: I usually have one graded group assignment in the middle or end of each lecture. Sometimes the group assignment requires students to pull out their books and do a careful textual reading and argument summary. Other times, assignments require students to evaluate an argument I've put into premise-conclusion form. And so on. Everyone is required to actively take part in order to get a grade on the assignment, and more advanced students often help less advanced students better understand the material. Finally, I conjoin the group assignments with a modest bonus-credit competition for each exam. Students accumulate "competition points" on the basis of their assigned grade, and on every subsequent assignment they get to bet some of their points on how well reasoned their next assignment is before they turn it in. If they get a high grade, the bet gets multiplied by a positive number (increasing their points), if they get a low grade it is multiplied by a negative number (losing them points). This friendly competition not only seems to encourage students to work harder (and have some fun!); it has a pedagogical point: to do well, the students have to develop meta-cognition, or the ability to recognize whether they have put together a clear, coherent, persuasive argument before it is graded. I also shuffle students into new groups after each exam so that every student works with every other student in the course.
- Short-videos & student-generated assignment-questions: I only tried this one once (in an upper division class on the Philosophies of Race & Gender in 2016), and the first day I tried it I thought it would be a disaster. Here's how it worked. Each day, I began class with a short, provocative YouTube video that related in some way or other to the reading due for that day (e.g. whether race/gender are biological or socially constructed, etc.). After showing the video, I asked groups (i.e. groups students are placed in for in-class assignments) to take five minutes to brainstorm potential group-assignment questions, and then present the questions and their rationale to the class. After hearing the questions and rationale, and getting a sense both of what the students seem to find most interesting and my own sense of which question(s) would work best for an assignment, I would select one or more questions for a graded group assignment. How well did it work? The first day, the response was silence. No one said anything. I almost gave up on the experiment right then and there, but decided to stick with it through the awkward silence. Finally, one group spoke up, then another, then another–and my goodness, some of the questions they came up with were really good, and not ones I would have thought of at all! It worked brilliantly the rest of the term, investing students in the material and giving rise to many good and unexpected discussions. Although I haven't done the activity in any courses since then, I'm really wondering right now why I haven't. Maybe it's because I don't tend to show videos in other courses–but still, I really do want to get back to it.
Anyway, these are just a few activities I've done in the classroom. What do you do, and why? Please do share away – it would be great to hear what you all do! 🙂
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