Activity aim: To encourage synthesis and reflection; to help students formulate questions; to check student progress
Materials needed: A piece of notebook paper and a pen (per student)
Time estimated: This is intended to be a <5 min. activity, but it can be extended.
Activity Description:
Students aren’t answering your questions during a discussion? Not sure if student understood the main purpose of today’s lecture? Assign a “one minute paper” to give them the opportunity to demonstrate what they’ve understood (and what they haven’t). At the end of a class (or a lecture section of a class, or at a particularly slow moment in a class discussion), ask students a questions with a definite answer:
- “What are some of the features of magical realism?”
- “Choose an element from Burke’s dramatic pentad, and use it to explain something from today’s reading or something you’ve read in the past 24 hours.”
- “What’s the primary rhetorical appeal that this ad uses? Explain why.”
…or choose something that’s a little more open-ended:
- “What are three major takeaways from today’s lecture?”
- “How will you apply what you learned today to the revision of your second assignment?”
Students should have one minute to answer in writing. It’ll probably take longer than one ACTUAL minute, and you can feel free to give them a few more minutes than this, of course.
You don’t need to grade these / respond to them individually: you can use them as a way to understand what students understand (and don’t) about the material, and use this feedback to help structure an active Q&A activity at the beginning of the next class. To do this, you could compile a list of student misunderstandings that came up in the one-minute papers (don’t single anyone out!), and have students offer corrections to the errors in groups or pairs while you circulate and listen. Then, elicit answers to particularly tricky corrections in front of the whole class.
Another way to use the feedback: put a list of 10 potential “most important” takeaways from last section’s lecture on the board that students wrote about in the previous class period’s one minute papers. Then, in pairs, students should whittle the list down to 5 takeaways. In groups of 4 or 5, they should compare lists and decide on three takeaways. Then, they can debate the three takeaways as a whole class. This serves the function of reviewing material while also giving you insight into what is still unclear.
Photo credit: Kristina Alexanderson