Back in February, KF posted a question to Palimpest: “How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they’ve read the whole thing?”

I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you’ve assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?

In my course on “Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing,” we’re reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we’re perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.

One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:

• What are the main points of this essay?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How does it differ from / disagree with other material we’ve read?
• How does it apply to the issues we are considering?

So what do you do?

[Cross-posted at Palimpsest.]

I gave a 5-question quiz in one of my classes today, and every single student did poorly. Let me rephrase that: every single student failed. This was not a difficult quiz, which leads me to hypothesize that the problem is that students just aren’t doing the reading, although it might indicate that they are having trouble with the material. They were assigned “What’s a blog?” at Blogger and this basic “Introductory Guide to HTML.” Very simple stuff. Additionally, the course text covered 16 different tactics of definition for an upcoming essay they’ll write in which they define a term. Consider these questions:

1. Define a blog using two different tactics of definition.
2. HTML uses tags. What’s a tag and what are some examples of tags?

Most students simply left these questions blank, not even attempting an answer. Part of me feels like it’s a problem of motivation. It’s easy to think that the first couple of weeks are simply time to coast. “We’re not really doing anything important, yet.” Then a quiz comes along. “Oh! You wanted us to actually read that stuff?”

However, I need to check in with the students during my next class to see what’s going on. I’ll point out the universal failure and ask their thoughts on the results. The biggest mistake a teacher can make is to assume one’s own infallibility.

Via Slashdot:
jefu writes “This NY Times story talks about the kinds of papers that students might find (and buy) on the web. It also mentions turnitin.com a site that will scan papers and attempt to determine if it was copied. The article uses ‘The Great Gatsby’ as an example and notes that for the time it takes to read the book and write a paper, buying a paper seems a poor tradeoff. However, many books (or required papers) involve much more work on the part of the student, so the question becomes that much more difficult. If you have to do a report on ‘Ulysses’ it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book – let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it.”

The discussion is interesting. I just like to see Slashdot readers argue about something directly related to my line of work, as in this entry I posted back in January.