Tag: engagement strategies
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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…
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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…
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Read-around for peer feedback
Providing a space for meaningful peer feedback is often difficult, especially given students come to it with negative experiences in their minds. We probably also come to the planning of peer review with our own negativity bias. I have had my fair share of unfortunate experiences where I walked away feeling wasted time with zero…
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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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The power of nonverbals
Entertainers are known to be able to “read the room.” The same can be said for public speaking. Yet, do we think the same about educators? I believe that having my undergraduate degrees in education and journalism (from the Diederich College of Communication) afforded me the perfect mix of reading and adjusting to the room.…
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Integrating classroom interactivity with Pear Deck
Finding the right classroom tech is difficult, especially when so many schools provide different types of access or have varying resources–and many have none. This post reflects on accessible educational technology (with premium trial and option) and easy to integrate into your classrooms using either Microsoft or Google. For transparency, I use the Google-based platform,…
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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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Learning more about students with four corners
Sometimes I want students to share more of themselves with the class, but I also acknowledge that doing this may be difficult if we focus on individual call-and-response. This activity gives you the opportunity and flexibility to get to know your students in a way that will help them feel seen yet still part of…
Patrick R. Johnson, MJE 