Tag: connections
-
Offering letters to our future selves
For those of us who were in school at the turn of the Millennium, creating time capsules was the highlight of the school year. Time capsules represent opportunities for us to think about who we were and are in the moment. My family remembers filling them for different significant moments in their elementary, middle, and…
-
Four corners strategies: Using the room and movement to your advantage
When you first enter your classroom, what do you notice? Is it the location of all the exits, the types of seating, or the technology opportunities? Is it something else? Have you thought about the walls? This strategy helps us to use the corners in the room to help students to work through questions and…
-
Generating buzz with buzz sessions
I don’t know about you, but sometimes a lesson is falling flat or students are struggling to bring the engagement for the day. So this quick post is a quick strategy to get them going again: Buzz Sessions. What it is: Students come together to generate ideas about a specific topic that are then used…
-
Cased-based teaching to promote critical process thinking
There are two types of case study-focused teaching. The first is the common practice of using case studies for deeper and more nuanced thinking about larger topics using a specific case to illustrate it. The second, the subject of this post, is creating cases to highlight critical thinking, process-focused learning, and student growth. This approach…
-
Quick-writes to bring it all back to you
(In case the headline doesn’t bring it all back to you, here’s the song that’s currently playing in my head that inspired it) Quick-writes, a cousin to free-writes, is a strategy that gives students a chance to dive back into an idea after a long break, bring forward ideas from the previous night’s reading, or…
-
Teaching students Knowledge – Question – Response
Transforming learning is certainly not the easiest task, especially in larger lecture courses where there aren’t as many opportunities to provide more application of the information. One easy way to do this is to add Knowledge – Question – Response charts to your classes. They look like this: Knowledge (or Argument) Question Respnse Something the…
-
Point-of-view thinking as a response activity
Helping students to translate academese to everyday-human language is often one of the foundational goals of our classes. Yet, there never seem to be a lot of strategies for higher education teachers to target that particular need. Here’s where point-of-view responses can help. What is it? The point-of-view strategy allows students to think like a…
-
Building from the bare bones: Skeleton notes and lesson structure
Scaffolding learning for students is one of the best ways to get students from where they start to the place we want them to be at the end of a lesson, unit, or class. A way to do this is to use skeleton notes, also known as guided notes, to give students a structure for…
-
Who Do You Want to Be? Setting up your classroom for culture-focused learning
Changing first-day questions can help elevate classroom culture for the remainder of the term. We all know that the first week of classes is commonly and comically referred to as “syllabus week.” It stems from the likely time spent reading the syllabus as a class, or what is more likely: to the class. There is…
-
Implementing gratitude and practicing grace
I am certainly someone who has no problem reaching into a bag of elementary teacher tricks to build engagement in class. In fact, I love to find a time or two in the term when I can get students to roll up their sleeves and have a little hands-on fun with the content. One of…
Patrick R. Johnson, Ph.D., MJE 