Exercises & Handouts
Clarity Races
For this activity, students first revise unclear sentences at home, then confer together as a team to decide on the strongest revisions, and finally compete against another team in class to win the most votes for clearest sentences. Objective To practice revising sentences with attention to what readers perceive as clear Key Terms clarity; revision; […]
Formulating Questions and Claims Based on Observations
In this exercise/activity, students work on their own and in groups to generate and evaluate questions and claims based on their observations or notes from an outside-of-class learning experience. Objective To turn students’ observations into claims and questions; to evaluate stronger and weaker questions/claims; to plan for an essay using students’ own observations as a […]
Crafting a Template for Your Observation Notes
Use these questions before an outside-of-class-experience to guide students to develop an organized structure for their notes. Students may answer these questions individually or in small groups, depending on the class and assignment, and then may discuss the different approaches they are planning to take. Objective To develop an organized, yet flexible structure for notes […]
Pre-Reflection for Outside-the-Classroom Experiences
Use these guiding questions to have students activate prior knowledge, make predictions about their experiences, and otherwise reflect before going into the field or community to participate in experiential learning. Some instructors may also want to have students fill out a K-W-L chart before (and after) their experience, depending on the site and/or assignment. These […]
Advice to Students on Preparing for Oral Presentations
Instructors may want to share this page with students as they are preparing for a presentation. What would they add to this list? What has their previous experience been? You may want to ask students to write a reflection on one or two items here that they have had strong positive or negative responses to, […]
How Research Works in a New Genre
This assignment helps to prepare students for the remediation of their scholarly essays into a new genre that draws on research. In addition to familiarizing students with the genre that they will need to produce, the exercise helps them to understand the role research plays in genres other than scholarly essays and to identify the research they […]
Finding and Using Model Abstracts
This activity has two parts. In the first, students work at home to familiarize themselves with the form of an abstract and to write their own; in the second, students build on this homework in small groups to more closely analyze the genre. One question asks students to distinguish abstracts from introductions, which is a point of confusion […]
Visual Representation of Texts
Many students find working in the visual mode a productive change. Thes two related exercises help students better understand challenging texts and prepare to write a paper on them. You may find that one or another works better in your class, or you may choose to use both, at different points in the semester. This […]
Creating an Oral Presentation Rubric
This activity helps students clarify the oral presentation genre; do this after distributing an assignment–in this case, a standard individual oral presentation near the end of the semester which allows students to practice public speaking while also providing a means of workshopping their final paper argument. Together, the class will determine the criteria by which […]
Using Different Kinds of Sources to Analyze an Exhibit
In this exercise, students first interpret an exhibit source without any supplementary sources and then reinterpret it in light of background and/or theory sources. Assembling a set of short, relatively accessible sources is key to this exercise’s success. The result is that students come to appreciate how background and theory sources can deepen their interpretation […]