Top 10 Classroom Strategies to Get Your Students to Think Gail Lancaster & Janice Thiel

1. Create a safe environment Online: Incorporate a warm video welcome to the class. Invite questions from students, and answer questions promptly with clarity and politeness; include the student’s name. Set ground rules for Discussion Forums and monitor appropriateness of student-to-student postings. (Jing) Case Study (U. N. Carolina, West Va U., Va Tech; 2005) Using Asynchronous Audio Feedback to Enhance Teaching Presence and Students’ Sense of Community: Four themes, which accounted for this preference, were culled out in an iterative, inductive analysis of interview data: 1. Audio feedback was perceived to be more effective than text-based feedback for conveying nuance; 2. Audio feedback was associated with feelings of increased involvement and enhanced learning community interactions; 3. Audio feedback was associated with increased retention of content; and 4. Audio feedback was associated with the perception that the instructor cared more about the student. Document analysis revealed that students were three times more likely to apply content for which audio commenting was provided in class projects than was the case for content for which text based commenting was provided. Audio commenting was also found to significantly increase the level at which students applied such content.

2. Get students to know each other Online: Assign an introductory forum activity for students to relay background, interests, etc., but more importantly learning goals and academic aspirations. Implement a survey, and share a spreadsheets of results. Provide a “Water Cooler” venue to encourage side conversation.

3. Assign reading to be done outside of class Online: Employ quick, low-stake quizzes on concepts from reading. Have students create flashcards or contribute to a database of text-based questions. Structure the majority of assignments to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate course concepts.

4. Conduct five minute quiz at the beginning of each class on reading Online: Unlock course material based upon successful completion of quiz or other assignment that assesses reading comprehension.

5. Lecture no more than 20% of the total class time Online: Provide interactive tutorials, videos, discussions, real-world application assignments, team projects, research, and other activities that veer from all-reading components. (WebQuests)

6. Involve all students in discussions Online: Make posting a requirement, and participate in the discussion yourself. Monitor quality of postings and whether students respond to their classmates. Divide class into smaller groups/teams. Give points for meaningful contribution to the discussion (rubric). Guide the timing of posts – original post due earlier in the week, and responses to classmates due toward end of the week. Structure discussions as a role-play activity.

7. Ask Essential Questions Online: Craft Discussion Forum prompts or journaling activities that have students pondering essential questions, for example, “How is your teaching different as a result of instructional technology?” Have students devise their own essential questions and pose to classmates. Model

8. Employ Socratic questioning The unexamined life is not worth living. Online: Have students submit “final paper” assignment in a series of drafts. Return drafts with feedback and questions in the margins through Microsoft Word tracking, Google Docs. Narrate feedback using Adobe insert comments or Jing. Model

9. Ask students to write the logic of an article or paragraph or chapter in the text Online: Give as an individual or team assignment for particularly poignant readings, rather than whole-class Discussion Forum. Then, follow-up with peer evaluation. (Blog)

10. Relate the current topic or course to the whole (system, discipline) Online: Incorporate announcements or other regularly-scheduled reminders about the connectedness of the current topic or concepts to the course, program, and real-world. Provide objectives in the form of questions. Create podcasts of “focus points.”