Baruch Faculty: First-Day Activities & Icebreakers
A collection of tried-and-true first-day activities and icebreakers submitted by Baruch English faculty.
Teaching Thesis Statements
The purpose of these activities is to teach different types of learners how to compose a thesis statement. They can be applied to all major assignments in ENG 2100 and ENG 2150, especially to critical analysis and research-based argumentative essays.
Rasheed Hinds: Using Databases for Bias Detection and Debate
Would work for hybrid classes
In this assignment, students use the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and New York Post (available via the Library Databases) to reflect on biases in media. Students compare and contrast how two newspapers cover a provided topic and engage in a debate to argue each newspaper’s stance.
Caitlin McDonnell: ‘Diving into’ Writing & Etymology
Would work for online, hybrid, and in-person classes
This exercise involves close reading/listening using Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Students will pick a word that stands out to them, and discuss its meanings, usages, and history.
Nathan Nikolic: Can You Help Me College?
Would work for online, hybrid, and in-person classes
This assignment is an introduction to college for students of 2100. It asks students to find a Baruch/CUNY resource or opportunity they think will be useful over their college career and to present it to their classmates.
Maria Plochocki: Synthesising Activity
Would work for online, hybrid, and in-person classes
This exercise helps students who have already chosen a topic/focus for their research-based assignment and completed some research to begin practicing synthesis. It requires them to answer some questions about their sources, building up to the “So what?” After completing this exercise, students should be ready to synthesise more/other sources, making writing the paper itself easier.
Titcha Ho: Genre and Stylistic Choice Awareness
Would work for hybrid classes
The mini assignment on social annotation highlights various social annotation strategies. It encourages students to observe linguistic features, develop genre awareness, and experiment with style and word choices. The exercise, designed for multilingual students in ENG 2100T and 2150T, is also applicable to mainstream composition courses.
Ju Ly Ban: What is in the Archives?
Would work for online, hybrid, and in-person classes
This in-class activity is an icebreaker for the start of the semester. It includes introducing students to the concept of personal and public archives in preparation for the Literacy Narrative essay assignment. Additionally, it serves as a foundation for a research project later in the semester, incorporating basic online database research.
Amy Yoon: Peer Feedback Exercise: Blind Peer Review
A step-by-step guide for facilitating an anonymous peer feedback process.
Kamal Belmihoub: Soliciting Peer & AI Feedback
This process primes students to give and receive feedback. After drafting, students request specific feedback from both a peer reader and ChatGPT, adjust their essays, and, finally, reflect on the feedback received.
Stephanie Vella: Guidelines for Peer Editing
These are simple rules of engagement alongside questions to consider when reading a colleague’s work.
Frank Cioffi: Believing and Doubting
To familiarize a class with the argumentative essay, this exercise asks students to consider the believability of a peer’s thesis statement.
Nathan Nikolic: Dealing with Failure (Revision)
This activity is meant to be supplementary to any paper writing process/assignment that includes a first draft, peer review, and final draft.
Adrienne Raphel: NYC Neighborhoods Research and Discussion
This exercise uses a map of (oft-debated) boundary lines of NYC neighborhoods to capture student interest and initiate inquiry ahead of the research paper.
Harold Ramdass: Rethinking the Literacy Narrative
The literacy narrative gives expression to students’ lived experiences and worldview, allows them to realize the ways these experiences often are the subjects of scholarly agendas and ideology, and empowers them to enter this wider discourse.
Titcha Ho: Teaching Transitions
This activity on transitions can be used during the revision process or after the exploratory draft to teach transitional words. The class discussion allows students to focus on how ideas are connected within a paragraph and between different paragraphs.
Kamal Belmihoub: Nominalization / Taboo Adaptation
Students assess word choice and build their academic vocabularies through one of two engaging activities.
Dan Libertz: In-Class Peer Response
Students learn a systematic approach to receiving and giving feedback in a writing group. The idea is to give them a system to try out that asks them to bring something to the meeting and fulfill roles during the meeting.
Constantin Schreiber: Writing Convention Discussions
Students lead in-class discussions on various writing conventions — style, word choice and tone, writing a (strong) thesis, and others.
Gerry Dalgish: Sentence Boundaries and Effectiveness (2100T)
Students repair Orwell’s use of fragments, run-ons, and sentence boundaries in general from Winston Smith’s diary in 1984.
Lynda Dalgish: Cultural Artifact Assignment
This assignment very early in the semester gives students a low-stakes chance to practice the basic skill of paragraph writing for an audience. Students have enjoyed sharing their culture with some common (Chinese red envelope), and some obscure (traditional Russian samovar) artifacts.
Joanne Grumet: Oral Debate
This is an in-class oral debate that prepares students to write their major research paper. It’s given slightly after midterm.
Safia Jama: The Learning Journal
This ongoing assignment asks students to reflect on their learning and working experiences over an extended period.
Carol Rial: Planning Handout for a Digital Project
This is a planning sheet for students to use in-class to guide them from their research-based project to a multimodal work. The theme of the course is Silence: Uses and Abuses. Students wrote papers on the topic of silence, then they listened to podcasts and explored comparable websites and videos.
Cathy Russell: Interview Assignment
Students explore future careers by interviewing others currently in similar careers—encouraging self-examination through writing.
Zachary Solomon: Art Analysis
This scaffolded assignment teaches the differences between summary and analysis and helps expand students’ abilities to analyze.
Jennifer Sylvor: Audio Essay
This audio essay is part of the scaffolding leading up to my second formal writing assignment, the personal narrative. The audio essay takes as its jumping-off point a suite of essays addressing the nexus of language and identity which we read over the prior two weeks.
Ann Vigo: Discussion Board Response to NY Times Article (2100T)
This is an early-in-the-semester assignment that helps students develop news literacy skills and participate in low-stakes written dialogue with each other.