Break It Down: A Quick Prep Method for In-Class Workshops

Our category 20 Minutes to Class Time shares ideas you can put together with little prep for effective in-person teaching. Today’s post focuses on a fast method for breaking down and modeling reading, learning, or writing strategies for in-class practice. I often hit the same point every semester: realizing my students know how to do

Engaging Students in Collaborative Grammar Play

Our students tend to associate one word with grammar: rules. Grammar rules can seem endless, arbitrary, confusing. But after gaining more practice teaching grammar this semester, I’ve come to associate grammar with a different word: play. Through my colleague Kathleen Johnson’s guidance, I’ve learned that the best way to engage students in learning how English

Using the Emotion Wheel as an Entry Point to Text Analysis

In keeping with the spirit of our 20 Minutes to Class Time category, today’s teaching strategy is one that requires little prep, a teaching tool you can adapt for multiple purposes in a writing or other text-focused classroom. Course Context I’m teaching an advanced rhetoric course this semester on public intellectualism that centers questions of

A Writing Process Experiment

We talk about writing processes in college writing courses at all levels, both to help students identify and reflect on what works well for them and to dispel the myth that there’s any such thing as a singular or linear writing process (Amicucci 34-35; Sommers 29; Yancey 26-27). In such a discussion, I’ll draw or

Taking Silly Putty Seriously

If you’re, ahem, of a certain age, then you remember a public service announcement from the Partnership for Drug Free America that ran in the 1980s. In that commercial (which can be seen in the first ten seconds of this You Tube video), the voiceover announcer somberly states, “This is drugs…” as the video portrays

Stocking the Pantry

A few weeks ago, we talked about our “20 Minutes to Class Time” presentation at Central New Mexico Community College’s 11th Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning. We were more than happy and amazed at the number of people who attended our session (it was about double what we had anticipated), and the feedback we

The Ungraded Inquiry

Some years ago when I was in an airport, I noticed a novel on the ticket agent’s counter. I asked how she was enjoying the book, and she said another passenger had left it behind. I replied I was curious about the novel as I’d seen it on booklists, and I wondered what she thought

Padlet: Your Gallery Walk, Virtually

In July, I described gallery walks as “the Swiss Army knife of teaching strategies” because of their versatility across a range of disciplines, assignments, and contexts. But gallery walks also can be replicated for your hybrid/online instruction, too, using a range of free software or programs that easily can be incorporated into your class. One

Circle of Questions

Our “20 Minutes to Class Time” posts provide classroom activities an instructor can implement at the last minute with items or materials that are at hand. We’ve all done it: we create a syllabus, perhaps for a course we’re teaching for the first time, and we put something generic like “Discussion of reading” on a