CTE Home

ACTIVE STUDENT INVOLVEMENT

ACTIVE STUDENT INVOLVEMENT
  • Small group discussions
  • Case studies
  • Role playing or skills practice
  • Simulations or structured exercises
  • In-class writing
  • Cooperative learning
  • Debates
  • Drama
  • Peer teaching
  • Peer editing

In addition to these more passive kinds of student involvement, there are a number of activities that involve students in the class in a substantial and overtly active way.  Discussion and demonstrations will be discussed more fully in another section.  Other techniques that teachers can use include:

SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION. One excellent tool to build student involvement in a class is to have them discuss a topic or question with a partner or a few other students. More introverted students often will discuss comfortably as long as the group is small (e.g., "Find a partner and discuss the symbolism of snow in Native Son"). The teacher can then ask small groups to report their findings to the class.

Always monitor your groups carefully to make sure they are spending time on their tasks. Walk around the room and ask each group questions about their progress. Let your groups know that you are paying attention to their behavior.
CASE STUDIES. This method, often used in business, psychology, and education courses, relies on describing, in some detail, a real-life situation. Students must consider the context of the problem in order to make decisions on how to solve it (e.g., students are presented with a problem in which a manufacturing facility has to lay off 50% of its workforce). Tell your student that you do not have a single right answer in mind, although there are better or worse answers to the dilemma. Remind them that good answers will acknowledge all the complexities of the case, including the values and emotions of those involved as well as the consequences of different solutions. ROLE PLAYING OR SKILLS PRACTICE. When students need to learn a skill, have them practice it through role playing, either in front of the class or in small groups (e.g., "What would you do if you were the principal of this school? Or the president of the teachers' union?"). You should model for your students how to role play. Let them see you participate in one of the groups, but remind them that you do not have a "right" or "wrong" scenario in mind. To ensure that all students participate during role playing, have the students who are not performing critique the performances of those who are. Tell them to state their criteria for evaluation. SIMULATIONS OR STRUCTURED EXERCISES. Specially designed games can help students understand particular theoretical concepts (e.g., having students play a strategy game might help them master a military history concept). Make sure that you carefully think through the mechanics of the games you choose. Consider how long the exercise will last, what problems might arise, how you will ensure that students are participating, etc. Practice the game with friends or colleagues to work out the kinks before you use it in your classroom. IN-CLASS WRITING. Most higher learning institutions now encourage writing in all disciplines. Writing during class is important because it can challenge students to use higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Some possible in-class writing assignments include brainstorming, journal writing, summarizing the main points of a discussion, responding to a particular issue, and writing mock essay exam answers. Remember that in order for your in-class writing tasks to promote student learning, they must be connected to course goals. Explicitly state how your writing assignments relate to topics you are teaching. In addition, make sure that you carefully select, plan, and evaluate in some way all of your writing assignments. Remind your students that you hold them accountable for writing during class. Never use in-class writing assignments to "fill up" time; students will not take future assignments seriously. Summarizing what you learned from their papers and reading excepts from a few good papers helps to show you take their work seriously. COOPERATIVE LEARNING. In a cooperative learning activity, which can span anywhere from one class period to an entire semester, students work in small groups to solve a clearly-defined task. Each student in the group performs a clearly specified role which is essential for completing the entire project. When projects are presented to their classmates, students will realize the value of pooling individual talents for the benefit of the entire group. Since most jobs require employees to work together to complete tasks, the skills students use during cooperative learning activities in an academic setting transfer to real-life situations. When you assign a cooperative learning task, be sure to give both oral and written directions and to reiterate them frequently. In addition, check on your students' progress as often as possible. You either may allow students to elect group leaders, recorders, researchers, etc. or you may determine their roles for them, depending upon how much autonomy you wish to allow them. If group members do not seem to be communicating effectively, you may wish to suggest possible role changes. DEBATES. Depending upon such factors as class size, student maturity level, available time, and subject matter, teachers might use either formal debates where students present opposing sides and rebuttals, or informal or conversational debates where students can interrupt with questions. Debates can be useful in helping students recognize and overcome the biases they bring to certain topics and in affording them opportunities to hone public speaking skills. In large classrooms, teachers can require students to prepare portions of the debate for homework and form larger debate teams. To guarantee that all students participate, you can require students in the audience to critique debates and to vote both before and after them. If your students will be debating controversial issues that may spark emotional reactions, discuss appropriate classroom behavior well before the debate begins. Remind your students to challenge ideas, rather than the personal integrity or character of their peers. DRAMA. Teachers can utilize plays to communicate much of the information that lectures typically cover. Groups of students might enjoy performing play scripts their teachers have written for them or writing their own scripts. Most likely, students will be more apt to remember concepts that are coupled with visual and auditory images (their classmates' acting) than words delivered solely by their teacher. Asking your students to write and perform a play that teaches a certain concept allows them to see how challenging teaching can be. Be sure to have your students evaluate their own and others' performances. Discuss why certain sections of the plays were more effective than others. PEER TEACHING. Most instructors recognize early in their careers that the ability to understand and manipulate concepts does not necessarily translate into the ability to teach those same concepts to someone else. Teaching requires an individual to refine his or her knowledge and to approach material from the viewpoint of others. Peer teaching in pairs or in small groups, particularly in large classes where there is little personalism, gives students a sense of autonomy and a voice in the classroom. This technique also allows the teacher to provide more individual instruction for students who are struggling with material. Through peer teaching activities, which can be used across the curriculum, students learn to assess their own communication skills as well as those of their peers. In addition, they learn to offer positive criticism and appropriate feedback to their classmates. Peer teaching encourages students to view the classroom as an open environment in which everyone has an equal opportunity to speak rather than a place where they passively listen to a teacher whose sole purpose is to deliver prepackaged information to them. When you assign peer teaching for the first time, remember that your students might not have participated in an activity like this before. Some students might feel skeptical about their ability to teach a concept or skill to someone else. Begin with a relatively easy assignment and then progress after your students have had a chance to develop a rapport among themselves. Provide explicit oral and written instructions for the task and explain to your students how you will evaluate their performance. If peer teaching does not seem to be working well, have your students assess individually and discuss collectively why teaching often is quite difficult. Your use of peer teaching will enable students to see teaching as a dynamic process rather than the one-way transmission of information. PUZZLE CLASSROOMS. This variant of peer teaching assigns different subject matter to each group and gives them the responsibility of teaching it to the rest of their classmates. Each group has a piece of the puzzle; when the pieces are all put together, everyone should see the whole picture. This technique is a good way to use extra readings that don't fit into the syllabus or to make use of short journal articles and contemporary accounts of the subject. Assign each group a different article or different parts of the same article. Give them the task of reading and discussing the article together, then writing a summary to present to the whole class. Give each group time to present their summaries and answer questions from the rest of the class. PEER EDITING. One highly successful form of peer teaching involves peer editing of student papers. Currently, many English faculty and TAs incorporate peer editing as a major cornerstone of their courses. Several benefits result from students reading and critiquing their own and their classmates' writing. First, this active learning strategy forces students to assess the needs and biases of many different audiences rather than just the teacher. Peer editing, which emphasizes writing as a process rather than a product, allows students to view their classmates as a valuable source of ideas, responses, and criticisms. In addition to broadening the scope of student writing, peer editing is a successful time-management strategy for faculty and TAs. Faculty and TAs who are following educational researchers' recommendations to include a substantial amount of writing in courses across the disciplines will find that peer editing can reduce the amount of time they spend evaluating papers. While they still must evaluate final papers, faculty and TAs can teach students how to critique first, second, and third drafts of papers. Peer editing can be advantageous to both teachers and students in large as well as small classes in every discipline. Before you allow your students to peer edit, you must model for them each step of the process. First, discuss with your students the criteria for evaluating student writing; these criteria probably will change for each new writing assignment. Next, using the board, an overhead projector, a flipchart, etc., demonstrate the types of comments you expect students to make on their peers' papers. In addition, give them written examples of positive and negative criticism. To give students practice in evaluating writing, you might place them in small groups and have them mark sample papers, complete a response sheet about the papers, and then report their comments to the class. After you have demonstrated how to critique writing, provide your students with a set of explicit oral and written directions for the peer editing process. At the end of the peer editing session, have students evaluate their experience with peer editing. Sharing positive and negative thoughts about the process will help to prepare them for the next peer editing session.


SAMPLE STUDENT INSTRUCTIONS FOR PEER EDITING SESSIONS

The Writing Center staff are available to assist you.

I.  THE CLASS PERIOD BEFORE GROUP EDITING BEGINS

a. Bring four or five (depending on group size) photocopies of a complete, word- processed draft of your paper. Give one of the copies to your instructor. II. OUT OF CLASS
For each group member's paper, including your own,
a. Read through the entire paper.
b. Fill out a peer response sheet.
III. ON THE DAY OF PEER EDITING SESSIONS a. When it is your turn, read your paper aloud. You might hearproblems, so keep a pencil in hand to make notes for yourself.
b. Specifically tell the group what you want feedback on.
c. Listen to your readers' comments and make notes. They may bring up issues in addition to those you mentioned. Feel free to ask members to clarify or expand on their comments.
d. Collect your photocopies and peer response sheets. IV. AFTER THE GROUP HAS MET
a. Carefully consider the oral and written comments of your group. Decide which suggestions (probably not all of them will be valid) will help you revise effectively.
b. Revise your paper. Remember that you are responsible for your own work and that no one else (including your group, the Writing Center, or your instructor) will or should take that responsibility away from you by telling you "everything" you need to change or by making those changes for you.
WHEN THE FINAL DRAFT OF THE PAPER IS DUE a. Along with your finished paper, turn in the peer response sheets you received so that your group members can get credit for their editing work.


Table of Contents

TA Handbook