NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

(4) Maintaining a class journal. "Journals record each student's personal, individual travel through the academic world and serve as springboards for formal writing assignments; they generate life and independent thought in a sometimes over-formal classroom atmosphere. Any assignment can be made richer by adding a written dimension which encourages personal reflection and observation. Field notes jotted in a biology notebook become an extended observation written in a biology journal.... Personal reflections recorded in a history journal can help the student identify with, and perhaps make sense of, the otherwise distant and confusing past." (from Toby Fulwiler, 1987, Teaching with Writing: p. 16-17.)

Fulwiler suggests that journal-write activities can be used to "bookend" a class session. Students begin class with a five-minute journal-write on a topic of the day's session. This jump-starts the class with students' active engagement of the material. The class ends with another journal-write, wherein students summarize what they have learned and reflect back upon their entries produced at the start of the class.

Outside of class, journals sharpen students' powers of observation and allow them to relate course topics to real events. Assignments to collect references from news broadcasts and newspapers that are pertinent to course content, and to reflect in writing on the facts, slant and apparent credibility of presentations in the popular media are powerful for sensitizing students to the relevance of some subjects. Closing exercises that require students to make a journal table of contents and to reflect on what they have learned by journal-keeping can be a good capstone at the end of a course.

(5) Students writing their own test questions. When we first began to teach, some of our best learning experiences occurred from composing questions and seeing how students responded to them. Some of us may have formally studied the purposes, levels and the types of questioning but, if not, then experience usually gave us insights about how to write better questions. If we teach students how to write questions that elicit real depth in understanding, we allow them to share in one of the best of our own learning experiences. Often, giving a simplified taxonomy of questioning (like the following, with a few examples) is enough to start students toward understanding at a higher level.

Collected questions can be used to promote in-class discussion and to compose review sheets and tests. This writing can be extended into cooperative learning excercise, where each student receives 40 questions passed from another group, and each group selects the best five for the review sheet and possible test purposes. Nothing adds more meaning to "Will 'it' be on the test?" than making students responsible for constructing "it."

Question level & type Often sounds like...

1. Recall	"Who ...?" or "What ...?"
2. Contrast	"Compare..."
3. Application	"If.... then what?"
4. Analytical	"Consider..., then why...?"
5. Conceptual	"Here are three situations:....State and explain a central unifying concept that links all three situations."