Tag: connections
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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How we bowl (academically) with bumpers
As many of us encroach on the final weeks of the academic term, finding opportunities for balance becomes increasingly difficult. This post allows us to reflect on our preparation for the end-of-term grind. What is more common than the senior slide? The end-of-semester/trimester/quarter slump. And that slump emerges in many different ways in ourselves and…
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Keeping up with the conversation: Assessing your discussion leadership
The fifth strategy of a five-part post about discussion strategies. These five strategies will help students to improve small-group communication while also allowing them to synthesize important course content in large-group discussions. It is appropriate and fair to see setting up discussions as one of the most difficult instructional strategies in our lessons. The easiest…
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Keeping up with the conversation: Fishbowls
The fourth strategy of a five-part post about discussion strategies. These five strategies will help students to improve small-group communication while also allowing them to synthesize important course content in large-group discussions. It is appropriate and fair to see setting up discussions as one of the most difficult instructional strategies in our lessons. The easiest…
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Keeping up with the conversation: Affinity mapping
The second strategy of a five-part post about discussion strategies. These five strategies will help students to improve small-group communication while also allowing them to synthesize important course content in large-group discussions. It is appropriate and fair to see setting up discussions as one of the most difficult instructional strategies in our lessons. The easiest…
Patrick R. Johnson, MJE 