Patrick R. Johnson, MJE

Journalism Professor & Student Media Director | Lover of horror, ethics, villains, and media | A "Prince of News" | Searching for the Second Star

Teaching Tuesday, a blog for JMC thinkers and teachers

  • Offering letters to our future selves

    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… Read more

  • Four corners strategies: Using the room and movement to your advantage

    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… Read more

  • Generating buzz with buzz sessions

    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… Read more

  • Cased-based teaching to promote critical process thinking

    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… Read more

  • Read-around for peer feedback

    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… Read more

  • Quick-writes to bring it all back to you

    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… Read more