At the end of class, asking your students to fill out an “exit ticket” before they leave the classroom can be a way of gathering information about what your students have learned and what they are still trying to understand. For the instructor, the information collected in these tickets can help direct your course prep by helping you identify the topics your students are still trying to grasp (or alternatively, have apparently grasped quite well, thus allowing you to move forward with other parts of the class). It also gives students the opportunity to concretely identify the important takeaways and to name in detail the questions they are still facing. Google Forms and Canvas Quizzes provide an easy way to make and distribute Exit Tickets.

Develop a prompt that students can reasonably respond to in written form within a short span of time. For example, you may ask students to spend three minutes writing about the most important, surprising, or challenging thing they feel they learned in class that day. Or, you may ask students to use five minutes to identify a claim in a course text that they find intriguing and to meditate on how they might transport that claim to a new context. While this activity can be incorporated into class meetings, it also can be combined with a periodic journaling assignment that encourages students to track what and how they are learning over time (see below).

Inviting students to reflect on the course content or a particularly complex question over the course of an extended period of time can be an effective way of encouraging students to reflect not just on what but how they are learning. A consistent, low stakes journaling project that is periodically turned in for feedback or combined with think-pair-share activities allows students to develop and accumulate analytical skills at a pace the students set for themselves.

Give students keyword(s) and prompt them to jot down related terms for 2-3 mins. Then, ask students to share and explain their lists and to draw connections between lists or to revise and expand their own based on the conversation.

If your class incorporates a significant amount of discussion, a think-pair-share activity can be an effective way of giving students time to engage with a complex topic and can encourage participation from students who may feel that the pace of a class discussion moves faster than they would prefer. In this format, the instructor poses a question, problem, or scenario that the students engage with over the course of three steps: (1) thinking through what has been posed individually; (2) pairing with a colleague to discuss their ideas; and (3) sharing their key findings with the class as a whole.

Give students a prompt, a series of statements, or other material that contains errors or misinterpretations of the material you have been covering in your class. Students then can work individually or in small groups to find and correct these errors. This strategy might be incorporated with a think-pair-share or small group activity (in which case, you may want to give your students time to present their findings to the class) or it might constitute an assignment of its own.

Whether you are teaching a seminar or a mid- to large-size lecture, putting students in small groups where they will work through a problem, consider a case study, do a close reading of a text, connect ideas to personal experiences, identify tensions in an argument, or any other number of activities, can be a valuable way of building community and introducing opportunities for students to apply the key practices and concepts of your course.

In a jigsaw discussion, students participate in two rounds of small group activities. Divide students into an even number of small groups, with one student appointed as a leader of their group. In the first round (“focus groups”), each group of students is given a different “piece” of a larger topic to study or discuss, with the task of producing notes or a brief presentation on what they have learned. All of the group members take time to study their own segment before being placed into a new round. In the second round (“task groups”), in which each new group has a representative from each of the first round groups, the students present to each other the work that they completed in the first round of discussion. Jigsaw discussions help show students the variety of ways that knowledge is constructed.

Assign a small group of students to a panel-style discussion about a reading or course relevant topic that will take place on a particular day in class or by a particular time on a discussion board. Circulate a couple brief questions in advance to just these students and ask them to prepare their own answers and to be ready to engage in conversation with their co-panelists. Observers of the panel should listen carefully, take notes on what they feel made an effective answer in the panel, and answer the question themselves as the panel transitions into a broader discussion.

Students often report that some of the most valuable insights come from their peers. Short presentations can be an effective way of encouraging students to gather, produce, and communicate knowledge, and also gives the instructor an opportunity to assess how students are engaging with central concepts and arguments from the course. Students may be asked to guide discussion of a course text or may be invited to develop and deliver original research on a key topic.

Prompt students to find material that relates to the readings or discussions for a week and to reflect with each other on the connections between what they are learning and what they have found. For example, students might be put in groups, each of which is assigned to find and draw connections between course content and the following items: a news article; a podcast; a meme; a reading from another class; and a movie scene. Any items collected in this scavenger hunt might be reflected back to the students in a shareable document or section of the course site.

Ask students to write down one word that they feel they would have to use in order to explain what you are covering in class to someone who has not engaged with that topic. After they’ve written down their word, have them post that word to a board or other surface and invite them to look over the list as a group. In a classroom, you may have students write these on post-it notes or take turns writing directly on the board. Then, invite one student to explain why they wrote down the word that they did and to move that word to a new area of the surface. From that point, other students volunteer to place their word in relation to the first one (perhaps extending from it or developing a new branch), until a visual and textual representation of the topic in question has been produced.

Having students periodically collaborate in an application like Google Docs to brainstorm or take notes on a presentation can be an excellent way of increasing the accessibility of your class and encouraging students to critically reflect on how they are organizing and representing information.

Provide the students with a jumbled list of items and ask them to put them in order. In a classroom, you might do this with strips of paper. These items might be historical events or steps in a physical, environmental, or chemical process.

Polls are a quick, simple strategy that can be carried out in real time in order to get a sense of what your students are understanding or thinking about as they engage with the course content. From the student’s perspective, anonymous polls can also lower the pressure they may feel when asked a question or asked to provide an interpretation. You can utilize “live” polling platforms like PollEverywhere or Google Forms. Before developing poll questions, consider what kinds of information you want from your students, how you can best get that information, how you will share this information (if any), and how you will incorporate that information into the class.

You might consider using a number of ways to encourage students to engage differently with the course content and each other in addition to responding to you as an instructor. For example, you might ask students to use sticky notes or note cards to share important, compelling, or confusing quotes that they want to discuss in more detail. You might also ask a group of students to make a contribution to the discussion by jotting down a thought on the board. These alternate forms of communication methods within an in-person class encourage various forms of participation in addition to verbal participation