Streamlined Reinforcement

After having slowly developed and incorporated active learning into my classes on a limited scale, two years ago I was ready to devote the class exclusively to these techniques, which meant I also had to adjust my examinations to assess more accurately for the new ways my students would be learning. I also wanted to streamline the collaborative learning, the homework, the studying, and the testing so that they better reinforced each other. So now I divide classes into five groups of students for whom I generate five specific, textually-analytical prompts and upload in advance of each class meeting in our online management system. Then, to accompany their presentations to each other,

these same prompts are placed in PowerPoint slides, which I convert soon after to pdf handouts and upload as study aids. Some among these prompts I choose as essay questions for their examinations, which accounts for 70% of those grades; this encourages them to produce results and to pay attention to each other in class. They spend fifteen to twenty minutes discussing their prompts, which most are accessing through their mobile devices. They frequently record their results on marker boards and then they stand to offer their responses to their peers with occasional assistance from me. This streamlined reinforcement helps meet several of our learning objectives: it encourages critical and analytical reading, effective writing and speaking, appreciation of diversity and the arts, and informed and engaged citizenship.