Tools for Faculty

Below are ideas offered by other faculty and by office staff to develop an interactive classroom. Suggested activities are classified into four categories: group bonding, discussion activities, writing activities, and presentations.

Community Building

1. Take a group picture on the first day. Post it to Blackboard.
2. Some faculty like to learn something unusual about students to help themselves remember names. Ask an unusual question to generate a story, either just about the student's life or related to the course topic.
• Describe your favorite book or film
• Tell about a scar or a tattoo
• Relate your own autobiography
3. If students seem shy, have them introduce themselves (or tell a story) to each other, and then have them report about their partner (instead of self).
4. If students seem reluctant to come to your office, try holding office hours in the Fishbowl area of the EMU. And/or, try to meet students 'for coffee' in groups of 3 or 4 over the first few weeks of the quarter.
5. On the first day, have students classify themselves as 'listeners' or 'talkers' (include yourself!). Divide the class into these two groups to discuss why they became this way. Reform as a whole group and discuss the results, as well as how and why this might change.

Discussion Activities

1. If you would like to encourage every student to speak, consider using writing to help students feel comfortable with their ideas before speaking. Have students write for five minutes on a topic. Then, they could either share their thoughts in small groups, or you could ask randomly for students to read their thoughts.
2. If you have some students who dominate the class inappropriately, consider introducing a requirement that students help each other to participate. You could either speak to the student individually about drawing others out, or try to develop a classroom policy that everyone must not only speak but also help others to speak.
3. If students' mention of personal experience seems to go off-topic, be prepared to weave it into the discussion by asking some questions about the context of that personal experience. Where did you learn that? How did you come to know it? What do you still not know, and why?
4. Require substantial preparation before class discussions.
• Ask students to write a question about the reading; write an answer to that question; and then write another question for the class to consider.
• Use a listserv or Blackboard space where students (or groups of students) must post responses to readings and their questions.
• You might ask one student or a small group of students to summarize these responses in order to start class discussion.
5. Ask the students to map the course concepts covered so far in the class, using the syllabus. Include a question useful to you for consideration in small groups
6. Ask students to compare and contrast two subtopics or concepts in the course in writing or in small groups; then return to the whole group for discussion.

Writing Activities

1. Ask students to write for a few minutes when they arrive in class, to record their thoughts and to remind themselves of the topic at hand. This could be writing on a focused question.
2. Require students to keep a journal. You could encourage them to use this journal in class for record-writing, when they have turning points or when they might want to note down their thoughts after a discussion.
3. As an early assignment on a topic, ask students to write a letter about the topic to a friend or relative. In this way students can generate ideas in their own idiom. You can also raise the question of audience knowledge or ignorance, and how to 'play to' or address the audience's needs.
4. An assignment similar to a letter is the response paper, a relatively informal short paper which asks students to record their first ideas and conclusions. Early use of response papers can help students to practice the development of thesis statements and the distinction between opinion and reasoned argument.
5. Consider breaking down an early assignment into pieces:
• Reaction. Write your first, most emotional thoughts about a topic.
• Opinion. Shorten your first thoughts into a stated belief about the topic.
• Argument. Develop your opinion into an argument by adding evidence and context.

In the UO Composition Program, students are taught to write an 'enthymeme' in their papers, that is, 'a thesis statement with a because clause'.

6. Require students to write several short papers based on the same set of analytical questions presented or developed at the beginning of the course. Students in the ALS program have commented that this activity helps them to adopt their own principles of analysis.
7. Consider structuring a short paper assignment around discussion. Ask students to share their first thoughts on a listserv. Have the class discussion. Then, require students to rewrite their paper in light of class discussion with a note explaining how their thought changed and why. The purpose of this activity is to help students pay attention to class discussion and recognize how interaction can change their thoughts.
8. Some faculty members have posted the most successful graded paragraphs or essays. This can be done anonymously or by name, but the goal is to provide an example of successful writing and model the community's recognition of good work.
   
   Writing that builds to a research paper
9. Ask the students to write a letter to the author of a text. This activity aims to get students to engage with the author's voice and ideas, instead of only focusing on their own.
10. Ask the students to write a practice annotation, as if for a bibliography. Have all students use the same text (perhaps a class reading) and state its usefulness for the class's agenda. This can help students to think about the main ideas in a text and practice evaluating it for their research goals.
11. Ask students to create a dialogue among different texts using quoted excerpts and their own comments as transitions. This activity takes clear instructions and persistence, but it can help students to see the relationships among different texts, to select quotations, and to practice commentary.

Presentations

1. Ask students to fill out evaluation forms for other students' presentations. This activity encourages them to pay attention to presentations and can help the faculty member to get a full evaluation of how well the presentation communicates.
2. In a rubric (description of expectations), require the inclusion in presentations of contextual information:
• how the presentation topic relates to the course reading
• how the topic relates to things outside of class, in the student's life or his/her observations of the world
• how the topic relates to or was affected by class discussion

Some faculty have found that this allows them to link class learning to a broader context and provides a model of how lifelong learning happens.

Handouts for Students

Some faculty have prepared materials which they hand out to students as part of the writing assignment. Requiring students to review a checklist or to ask themselves a series of questions before turning in a written assignment can help them to take responsibility for their work (and reduce the number of small mistakes you need to correct). We offer the following examples that faculty may want to modify or adapt for their own use.

1. Professor Michael Stern of Scandinavian Studies has prepared the following handout.

Writing University Papers

2. Professor Mark Unno of Religious Studies has a series of pages where students can read about his expectations and print out a checklist of requirements for their assignments. From the link below, navigate to Professor Unno's homepage and see under "Learning." (Please cite Professor Unno if you use his materials.)

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~religion/faculty.htm