Teaching Ideas For Class Participation Activities For Students Success: Hello Guys, if you want to make grading easier for yourself maybe one route you’re taking is doing a lot of participation activities, where students either get the points or they don’t, depending if they do the activity or not and so you might be wondering well how can I best use these to my advantage and to the student’s advantage in the classroom.

Teaching Ideas For Class Participation Activities For Students Success

So today we are going to tell you about five different ways we use participation activities in the classroom to achieve certain goals. This article is for the teachers and instructors who wants make their grading easier and searching for tips and ideas for their teaching life. so if we interest you keep on reading.

Now, again today we’re talking about five different ways of using these activities. So lets go for it.

1. Help students understand a larger concept

The first is to help students understand a larger concept in your classroom. so in this case, an example of this is in our writing and literature course, we’re talking about the ties between literature and culture so how literature influences culture how culture influences literature in turn the cycle of that relationship. so we gave them a discussion forum activity in which they had to find either a commercial or an object or a business, something in the real world that has an illusion, a reference to a literary text to kind of show just how immersed literary attacks are in our current culture.

So we showed them a commercial about a watch company that had a white rabbit from Alice in wonderland running around saying i’m late i’m late right. but if he had a watch he wouldn’t be or a cereal commercial for a honey flavored kids cereal and of course Winnie the pooh is searching for another snack and comes across this cereal.

So how can a literary text influence some kind of media object or physical object etc, and so again if they turned it in then they got the point. if they did it correctly, they found an object that’s tied to it and if they didn’t obviously they get no points.

So in the post they had to link that thing and again a brief explanation well what literary text is influencing it. what are they alluding to here, what’s the connection and so definitely think of, there’s these major concepts in my class that I want to make sure my students are grasping have them do a quick activity, where they find an example of this concept in the real world and post it and if they get it right they get the point and if they don’t maybe you give them partial credit for trying but of course if they don’t turn in then they get zero points so that’s way one of using these activities.

2. Submit a portion of a larger project

The second one the goal here is to actually have students submit a portion of a larger project to make sure they’re understanding the skills needed to complete that project. so in our case in our composition course, we had our students submit two examples of MLA citations of academic journal articles because in each of their papers they had to have MLA citations in their works cited of academic sources.

So, the goal here was just start researching the topic that you’re going to write your first paper about and then the homework assignment was to find two articles that you might be using and create the MLA citation for them.

Here’s a guide, we went over how to do this in homework in class. We showed you how to actually automate the citation in the database potentially and just edit from there if there’s any issues. so go ahead and find these things and curate them and so in that way, we have two solutions here.

Two reasons, why this is important, one they actually have time to find the articles they’re using for their paper so they have one more thing done and two, we make sure they actually understand how to do an MLA citation and if they didn’t then We know they have to do another lecture or maybe meet with them one-on-one to show them how to do this right.

So, something very short that they turned in, it’s just the two citations and again okay, you did it, great, you get the point. you didn’t do it, you don’t get the point. you might have half credit or three-fourths credit. if yes, you turn them in but they’re not fully an MLA citation. you did APA or you did partial MLA.

So that’s another approach to doing it. think of, small things to submit to make sure they’re under getting the skills needed for a later part of the classes.

3. An activity that motivates students

Now, along similar lines the third type is an activity that motivates students to make stable progress on a piece of work. So potentially, We have our students turning in a paper outline next week. but it’s specifically in some literary analysis paper, the outline has a very specific structure. did it mean your thesis, and you’re gonna give me four to six topic sentences that support that thesis because you’ll need four to six paragraphs of supportive information to reach the length requirement of this paper that’s coming up.

So if they had to do this now that means they’re progressing in the larger project little by little rather than you know three weeks from now they’re writing the whole thing.

You know the day before it’s due or three days before it’s due. We have assignments that are requiring work to be put in to give them progress. progress throughout the weeks leading into the deadline. so a small thing you can assign every once in a while that ensures that they’ve made progress because they couldn’t complete it without actually working on the larger project.

So again, that’s not a way of almost like doubling up, like hey you have to do the work anyways. get more participation points for actually doing it in a timely manner. so that’s an approach as well, it’s also a way of giving them formative feedback while they’re working on a larger project. so if we see the outline and there’s an issue, hey this thesis won’t work for this reason. revise it a bit or hey this is all great but this topic sentence you want to double check because We think it can be countered by what we’ve been reading.

So that’s another approach as well for formative feedback as well as stable progression in a larger project. if you’re liking these ideas make sure share these ideas with your friend over social media websites.

4. Participation activities that require some homework

This next one is giving them participation activities that require them to do some type of homework assignment in order to complete the activity. So again, in our case we are thinking reading here, so if we are seeing that a lot of students aren’t reading because they’re not discussing at all in class then we might have, okay you know what, when you do the reading, do this little activity, do this kahoot game, do this discussion forum, do this little you know reading quiz, do something that shows you’ve actually read the content that we’re gonna discuss in class.

So this is more of like pushing students to make sure that they’re doing what they need to do for at home. so that they can succeed in a discussion or an activity that’s going to take place during class in the future. So you give them the points, saying great job, you know you’ve got the points for doing this and that means you’ve also accomplished the homework as well which means you can excel in the classwork as well.

So it’s a win-win-win situation here. so we don’t always do these if my students are obviously really on task and they’re having great discussion. we don’t need to give this extra homework but if there is that aspect of the issue in that class then we’ll add this activity every once in a while to kind of really say, hey you must be doing this reading in order to succeed in this classroom.

let me help by giving you extra points participation for completing activity that connects to it.

5. Community building participation activities

The fifth one is all about giving space for your students to get to know each other and for you to get to know your students as well. and so these are community building participation activities. so my first homework assignment every single semester is the same thing, go to the discussion forum and answer these few questions about yourself. what name or nickname do you prefer, what are your pronouns what’s your favorite book, if it’s a literature course, tell me one interesting fact about you, what do you plan on doing when you finish college.

So just a few questions that you get to know them, they get to know each other. oh hey that’s your hobby that’s mine too, oh hey I love this as well you want to play this game together. so you can create that community building early on but you can do that throughout the semester as well.

So something that might say you know what, we’re doing this thing about the genre of sci-fi, maybe i’m going to do a little post. hey you get one point by just telling me what your favorite sci-fi book, movie, tv show whatever is or why do you hate sci-fi, you know if it’s not your cup of tea and again like, hey you know you want to be making friends I teaching freshmen. you should see the responses here and see what you have in common with your classmates.

Start friendship building in the class connecting it to the class topic and giving them like maybe a half point on those lines for completing those types of activities.

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