Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

This module offers fun ways to engage students and a fast, low-stakes way to express and assess student learning each week.  Students, individually or in groups, summarize the main lesson they learned in class that week by using a series of creative, expressive communication techniques, which facilitate multiple means of expression and engagement.  I describe the instructional strategy for engaging students in otherwise wearying or intimidating courses.  

The senior capstone course in sociology is known among students for being challenging and tedious.  They must pass the capstone course with a C or better to graduate and, unlike many of their other courses, it is not topic-driven and thus not so relevant to their life experiences and interests.  I therefore wanted to find ways to engage students and acknowledge the difficulties and pressures of this rigorous required course by introducing an affective dimension to the learning process.  Further, realizing that I did not always know if the lessons I sought to impart were being understood well, I wanted to find ways to assess how well students were learning what I was teaching each week.  

While my sociology course is a traditional face-to-face class, the devices I share can easily be used in online environments as well.  This module provides a series of templates that teachers can download and use, electronically or on paper, online or face-to-face, to engage students in fast and fun reflective summaries of that day’s or week’s lesson.  While I used these as quick in-class assessment activities, they could also be assigned as homework activities.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.