Participating in Your Course
Traditionally, cold calling and warm calling have often been used to engage students in the classroom. Although these methods may still be used, consider other ways students can participate in your course or with your course materials. Provide students with multiple opportunities to participate, to engage every learner and make grading for participation more equitable. Below are some examples of other ways students can participate in your course. With each of these examples, it is still important to provide a rubric or some type of grading criteria for participation.
Polling
Receive immediate feedback on whether students are learning using polling technology, such as Poll Everywhere. Even better to share the responses with students to give them feedback on their own learning. Polling can also be a class discussion starter to gauge prior knowledge and readiness to discuss certain topics. To learn more, review the CBS Poll Everywhere guide. Some examples of how to write good poll questions:
- Asking Meaningful Questions (Turning Technologies)
- Sample Polling Question Types
- Developing Poll Questions to Engage and Assess Student Thinking in Science and Engineering Courses (Columbia CTL)
Entry/Exit Tickets
Ask students a concept check question(s) at the beginning or end of the class session. They can submit via a polling tool or on paper. Every student that writes a response will earn the participation grade for that day. These concept checks serve as formative methods for faculty and students to track students’ understanding of the course material. Some sample questions might be:
- What is one new thing you learned from the reading assigned to you for homework?
- What question do you have on our topic today?
- What are the 2-3 main takeaways from class today?
- What is one thing that is unclear or confusing from class today?
- Based on today’s class, what might be a good exam question?
Group Google Doc Assignments or Document Annotations
Adopt online tools to facilitate group participation. Students can have discussions in smaller groups or engage with course materials through a Google doc. Students can interact with Google docs to collaborate in or outside of class. Google docs or other annotation software allows students to focus their conversation around a particular text.
Discussion Boards
During class, it may be challenging for some students to quickly process what you’re teaching and formulate a verbal response to participate. Online discussion boards used between class sessions allow students to respond after they have had time to reflect and craft an answer. Some tools available for online discussion are Canvas Discussions and Ed Discussion.