Warm-Up: What are some of your favorite
"first-impression" activities?
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 | Start by practicing what you will be teaching: A language teacher,
for instance, enters on the first day speaking Spanish for his
greetings. He tells a joke designed to get students to relax
about the trial-and-error nature of language learning by illustrating
that even experienced learners of Spanish make mistakes. |
| "Ten Things I Can Do to Be Successful" in the course
starts by defining success: Is it only an A? Can a B signify success?
Is passing a success? (The teacher revised this activity from
"10 Ways to Get an A" because that was too limiting.)
Review the list during the semester. |
| Acknowledge the life experiences of students that are relevant to
the course by sampling: "How many of you have ______?"
(Children for a pediatrics course, for instance.) |
| 3-step interview: Students pair and interview each other, then
introduce their partners to the class. Interview questions can
be related to course content, such as "If you weren't majoring in
[course subject, if for majors], what might you have taken as your
major?" The manner of introductions tells about the
introducer, and the content tells about the partner introduced. |
| On the first day and later, signal note-taking opportunities with
repetition, questions, slower speaking pace [or even asking directly,
"If I were going to quiz you on this information to see if you
understand and can apply it, what question(s) might I ask?"]
Students could speak or write suggestions and critique each other's
questions to push them beyond simple recall. |
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| Above
While standing in front one of Jim Eison's overhead
slides, Dr. J. Fay Collier Kelle of Mary Baldwin College reports out
highlights from the group in which she participated. |
Workshop Structure: The
pattern for the day's activities thus began with writing and a whole-group
discussion. We continued by dividing into groups (one per topic) to
discuss the topics that follow, make reports across the day, and use the reports
as springboards to general discussion, to which Dr. Eison contributed ideas from
research, from experiences of other colleges, and from his handout for the day.
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1999