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This post first appeared on January 28, 2015.
One of the great challenges for many of us is getting students to really engage with the readings. Students may read before class, but don’t annotate. Student may not read at all. And many students don’t necessarily think on their feet about the readings at hand. One of my challenges in the classroom is getting students to go back to the text itself, rather than simply talking in abstract terms about what happened in a story or a play.
As a member of my university’s faculty development committee, I’ve found myself in charge of a workshop on this very topic: getting students to engage with the reading. Given that’s it’s time for a new semester, I thought it might be useful to share a list of activities to use in the classroom to help foster thoughtful engagement with the text itself. Some of these are things I’ve written about before, some are ideas from other people that I’ve found helpful.
In-class discussion questions
Everyone approaches classroom discussion differently, and every class dynamic requires some different approaches to the way we present the questions to the students.
Writing as Discussion
Many of my courses are writing intensive courses, so I try to integrate written analysis of the literature into classroom participation.
In class reading
Actually having students read in the classroom can be useful, particularly early in the semester when they’re just figuring out how to do the work of the literature classroom.
Multi-modal approaches
Encouraging students to have fun with the literature, while still looking carefully into the text itself can be a useful way to engage students who are not English majors.
I think that all of these are adaptable for different levels and for different texts, which is generally how most of my teaching goes: I see what others are doing, and I adapt it to what works with my particular groups of students. I’m looking forward to another semester of teaching — and I certainly plan to adapt some of these activities in new ways for my classrooms.
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