Kate Cammack, CfT Co-Director
We’ve made it to fall break! Hopefully you have given yourself permission to celebrate, relax, and do some things that you enjoy – or perhaps just take a few deep breaths.
I am busily employing all of my standard procrastination techniques to avoid finishing my midterm grades today. Anyone else?
A few teaching opportunities that mid-semester brings:
- Feedback for you. If you haven’t already done so, this is a terrific time to check in with your students about how things are going. I typically use an anonymous version of start-stop-continue — just make a quick, anonymous Google Form (here’s the one I used last week), generate a QR code to the form, and have your students snap the code and complete the questions in your last 5min of your next class. (FWIW response rates are typically much better if you have them do this in class, rather than asking them to do it on their own time). Short on prep time? Hand out index cards for them to write a quick minute paper on what’s helping (or hindering) their learning in your course.
- A metacognitive opportunity for them. You might ask students to reflect critically and constructively on their own learning experience thus far. How are they engaging in your class? How do they think they are doing, with respect to any guidelines set earlier in the semester (e.g., discussion norms, class community agreement)? What worked (and didn’t) in their preparation for your midterm exam (e.g., exam wrapper), and can they articulate what they might do differently next time (see this simple example from a chemistry course)?
- Hit the reset button. Students’ motivation and intentions sometimes need a bit of a reset around midterm. For instance:
- if they seem to not be as prepared for class as you’d like (e.g., not doing all of the reading), you might ask them to complete these four quick questions on their reading prior to coming to class
- if you’re growing concerned that students are getting more lax about AI use, you might send them a gentle nudge reminding them what your course policy is and why it is important to their learning.
- if some aspect of your course isn’t working as you’d hoped, you might adjust it – have a conversation with your students, explain what you’d like to try and why you think it’ll help, and get their feedback.
Look what I just did in writing this – productive procrastination at its best (!)
