Last week I finally had a moment where I felt like I was able to connect with my students on a different level. \u00a0Having early classes I find that most of my students are half asleep for most of the class period, even through group assignments and discussions. \u00a0Aside from having them stand up and move around between activities I wasn’t really sure how to get them to wake up and be present. \u00a0I obviously avoid the dreaded lecture as much as possible, but I also felt that sometimes discussions were not engaging for most of them either. \u00a0During said class period I decided to do a thesis exercise with the class that engaged them on something other than the college experience. \u00a0Asking them to collectively come up with a topic unrelated to any of our readings, but rather something that was engaging to them, I found that both classes came up with the same topic: Sleep. \u00a0I then placed them into groups and asked the groups to come up with a thesis statement, 3 main points, and personal evidence to support these main points about sleep. \u00a0This led to a very surprising amount of engagement on their part. \u00a0It was clear that this was a subject that they were able to engage with and thus they were able to think in terms other than writing an academic essay. \u00a0This was a great exercise because they were able to see how their ability to connect with the topic led to clearer arguments and points being made. \u00a0It was probably the first moment that I had where I felt like I actually connected and got through to my students. \u00a0It was surprising to me that both classes came up with the same topic and that they were both engaged in the discussion. \u00a0This has gotten the ball rolling for me with my students and I feel like it opened the door for both of us to engage on a different, more productive level that wasn’t available prior to this exercise. \u00a0While the thoughts that led to this activity were my own, I found a useful website that suggests similar approaches to his problem:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.edutopia.org\/classroom-student-participation-tips<\/a><\/p>\n This website has a list of “10 smart ways to increase classroom participation” \u00a0one of which I mentioned earlier in this post: Physical activity. \u00a0When breaking students into groups for activities I have been asking students to get up and organize themselves in a line based on some ice-breaker type topic (birthday, first letter of last name, etc.), this has helped to get them moving and also breaks down some of the communication barriers between them. \u00a0I feel that both of these elements have helped to increase classroom participation and thus I feel that this “problem” in my classroom has lessened to some extent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I finally had a moment where I felt like I was able to connect with my students on a different level. \u00a0Having early classes I find that most of my students are half asleep for most of the class period, even through group assignments and discussions. \u00a0Aside from having them stand up and […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techrhet.com\/6925\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}