The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom

By Diana Fuss and William A. Gleason

The first comprehensive collection of hands-on exercises that bring active learning to the literature classroom

This is the first comprehensive collection of hands-on, active learning exercises for the college literature classroom, offering ideas and inspiration for new and veteran teachers alike.

These 101 surefire lesson plans present creative and interactive activities to get all your students talking and learning, from the first class to final review. Whether you are teaching majors or nonmajors, genres or periods, canonical or noncanonical literature, medieval verse or the graphic novel, this volume provides practical and flexible exercises for creating memorable learning experiences. Help students learn more and retain that knowledge longer by teaching them how to question, debate, annotate, imitate, write, draw, map, stage, or perform. These user-friendly exercises feature clear and concise step-by-step instructions, and each exercise is followed by helpful teaching tips and descriptions of the exercise in action. All encourage collaborative learning and many are adaptable to different class sizes or course levels.

A collection of successful approaches for teaching fiction, poetry, and drama and their historical, cultural, and literary contexts, this indispensable book showcases the tried and true alongside the fresh and innovative.

• 101 creative classroom exercises for teaching literature
• Exercises contributed by experienced teachers at a wide range of colleges and universities
• Step-by-step instructions and teaching tips for each exercise
• Extensive introduction on the benefits of bringing active learning to the literature classroom
• Cross-references for finding further exercises and to aid course planning
• Index of literary authors, works, and related topics

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781400873784

Book preview

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Introduction

This book is a collection of undergraduate teaching activities in the field of literary studies. We offer here 101 exercises for the college classroom, solicited from scholars and teachers around the United States (and beyond). Our contributors come from small private colleges, local community colleges, and large state or private universities. All have contributed a favorite literature exercise—one that has been tested and refined in the college classroom and proven a hit with undergraduates. As our volume title suggests, The Pocket Instructor offers an array of successful classroom activities: activities you can pull out of your back pocket whenever you may be in need of new teaching ideas or general inspiration.

Every exercise in these pages is designed to get students talking, thinking, and learning and affirms the central philosophy behind the volume: active learning pedagogy. Compared to traditional pedagogy, active learning pedagogy places greater emphasis on student communication and collaboration. This student-centered approach to teaching promotes more decentralized learning, often in the form of small-group work (discussion pods, warm-up activities, class debates, role-playing, problem sets, teamwork, group presentations). Active learning classrooms favor exercises that develop critical thinking skills, like brainstorming ideas, formulating questions, or solving problems. Such approaches can involve activities on a small scale (students listing items on a blackboard) or on a large scale (students collectively working on a case study). What active learning exercises all have in common is a core commitment to students working side by side, under the guidance of an instructor, not simply to receive knowledge but to discover, create, analyze, or apply it. The main purpose of this collection is to bring together, in one accessible volume, exercises that honor the importance of active learning in the college literature classroom.

THE ACTIVE LEARNER

Teaching practices and philosophies have changed dramatically in the decades since we began teaching. Most strikingly, teaching has become a far more interactive enterprise. While active learning emerged long before the World Wide Web and social media, the availability of new technologies in particular has fundamentally altered how students learn. Today’s college students, members of the Net generation, who have come of age in a multimedia and multitasking era, expect a more stimulating and engaged learning environment, and rightly so. ¹ Teachers are now faced with the challenge of creating not just more dynamic teaching exercises but more meaningful ones, exercises that do more than convey facts and figures already easily accessed with the tap of a finger.

Behind the current movement from teacher-centered to student-centered pedagogy is a much larger historical shift from an industrial economy to an information economy. Whereas an industrial economy required a hierarchical transmission of information from teacher to student, an information economy ushers in a world where information is already readily available. Students now must negotiate a learning environment of complex networks and relationships, a world in which knowledge is no longer discrete but embedded, no longer revealed but discovered. ² This larger historical shift from producing market goods to manipulating informational networks is changing not just what we teach but how we teach. These days the work environment is frequently an extension of the learning environment. Our capacities for social interaction, group problem-solving, and intellectual play, along with a willingness to keep on learning, innovating, and implementing, have become core conditions for success in a rapidly evolving and increasingly networked global economy. ³

Active learning pedagogy prepares students to work more creatively, and frequently more collaboratively, to tackle and solve problems while negotiating differing opinions and diverse worldviews. Educators have understood this teaching practice in both general and specific terms. In perhaps its simplest definition, active learning involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing. ⁴ In its fuller definition, active learning provides "opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject." ⁵ Whether broadly or narrowly defined, a vast body of research has revealed that active learning exercises work significantly better than traditional teaching methods—methods based on the old industrial knowledge-transmission model that relies heavily on the conventional lecture format. Since the late twentieth century, extensive research on pedagogy (nearly six hundred studies by 1990 alone) has consistently shown that students at all levels not only learn more from active learning exercises but also retain what they learn longer. ⁶

Studies have also demonstrated that active learning exercises create more comfortable learning spaces for many different types of students, including unacknowledged or alienated students who feel more welcome in peer learning environments, women and minority students who perform better in collaborative rather than competitive classrooms, and shy students who feel more at ease talking in small groups. ⁷ Enhanced experience and understanding of diversity is one particularly significant side benefit of active learning classrooms. Another important bonus: students and teachers alike are reminded that honing and improving oral skills, and not just writing skills, is a vital component of critical thinking. Rather than remain largely silent or passive, students exposed to active learning exercises have regular opportunities to practice and develop their oral proficiency.

Designing and incorporating into our teaching more interactive activities, in which students learn not just from us but from each other, requires a conceptual shift in how we understand the classroom itself. The classroom becomes less a lecture space and more a learning studio or workshop, a place for students to actively practice their reading, writing, reasoning, and other abilities and to do so not in isolation but in groups. Anyone who has spent time in the college classroom already knows that students working together bring a different kind of energy and focus to the classroom. Undergraduates often learn best when they learn from each other. But as the exercises in this volume attest, such learning activities need to be carefully set up and closely supervised. Active learning holds both teachers and students accountable for the open-ended intellectual activities that take place in an organized and supportive environment. Striking this important balance—between too much freedom, on the one hand, and too much regimentation, on the other hand—is the key to a successful active learning exercise. The aim is to promote intellectually adventurous critical thinking guided from the start by a clearly stated learning goal.

Active learning, which sometimes also goes under the names engaged learning, collaborative learning, or deep learning, has been around for much longer than its name. The assumption that educators have only recently discovered the many benefits of interactive learning may not tell the whole story. ⁸ It has never been quite the case that college teachers have concentrated solely on conveying information to students; in discussion sections, seminars, and assignments, faculty have long experimented with creative learning exercises even beyond the familiar student oral presentation. Diana remembers from college a small-group assignment to prepare, present, and revise a contemporary poetry syllabus. And Bill recalls one of his college classes being asked to insert themselves imaginatively into individual lines from Shakespeare plays in order to understand the impact of character on tone and diction. Significantly, these are the classroom exercises that we have never forgotten (and that may well have decided our future careers).

It is important to recognize that while the exercises featured in this volume include new ideas for interactive teaching and learning, they also represent the collective wisdom of generations of teachers dedicated to engaging their students in fresh and inventive ways. Some of these favorite literature exercises have been handed down from teacher to teacher over decades. Some are much newer and reflect changes in classroom technology (the availability of Blackboard or the use of laptops) or recent evolutions in literature itself (the emergence of graphic novels or the popularity of slam poetry). Our goal has been to gather together in one place the best of these literary exercises and make them available to a wide audience.

THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

New teachers can find a number of useful teaching handbooks to ease their way into the classroom. The most popular of these guides—Wilbert McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, 14th edition (2014), Anne Curzan and Lisa Damour’s First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching, 3rd edition (2011), and Barbara Gross Davis’s Tools for Teaching, 2nd edition (2009), all periodically revised and reissued since their original dates of publication—have excellent pieces of general advice, including tips for leading discussion and ideas for organizing lesson plans. ⁹ None, however, focus on what new teachers often need most: a comprehensive set of discipline-specific exercises to use in the classroom.

Within the field of literary studies, Teaching Literature (2003), by our former colleague Elaine Showalter, is especially helpful for its reflections on many important aspects of teaching that too often go undiscussed: the anxiety dreams, the students who won’t talk or can’t talk, the days when we can’t talk ourselves. ¹⁰ Our volume differs in focus by offering not general teaching anecdotes but detailed teaching recipes. This volume also departs from the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature, a series that focuses primarily on individual literary texts (for example, Approaches to Teaching Dickens’s David Copperfield). Containing essays rather than exercises, the MLA volumes usefully identify structures and themes within the text, review available editions and works of criticism, and provide biographies and chronologies. While some of the ideas in the Approaches section of this long-standing series might be convertible into specific classroom activities, they are not presented in the user-friendly format we offer here, nor are they broadly conceived as active learning exercises.

The following pages present specific interactive exercises pitched directly to the literature classroom. With a focus on dialogue and reflection, conversation and cooperation, these exercises demonstrate a variety of ways teachers of literature might both cover course content and help students actively formulate questions and develop skills. The opposition between old content-based teaching and new skill-based teaching is, in our minds, largely a specious one. It is impossible to do one without the other. In the words of cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, deep knowledge may be our goal but shallow knowledge will always come first. Thanks to the new brain research on how we learn, we now know that the things we value most in active learning, skills like problem solving and complex reasoning, are actually closely linked to the information retained in our long-term memories. ¹¹

For this reason we have sought to offer exercises that are both content rich and adjustable—exercises with enough options to satisfy any literature instructor teaching across a range of genres and periods, to majors or nonmajors. If you are in the market for a good exercise on how to teach poetic scansion, or narrative voice, or dramatic situation; if you are wondering how to get students excited about The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, or The Waste Land; or if you are searching for ways to integrate noncanonical, interdisciplinary, or cross-cultural materials into your literature classroom, then this book is specifically for you.

This is the book, in other words, that we wish we had had when we first started our own teaching careers. Our goal in assembling it—from soliciting the individual exercises to deciding how to organize them into useful, discrete sections—has been to capture, collate, and codify those unique disciplinary strategies that make teaching literature a distinct enterprise, not at all the same as leading a discussion on labor economics, running a lab on chemical synthesis, or conducting a workshop on language instruction. While different academic departments teach some of the same skills—critical thinking chief among them—the strategies for teaching both content and method can vary widely across disciplines. Equally important, they can vary considerably across fields within the same discipline. In literary studies a Socratic dialogue approach that might work brilliantly in a fiction class on characterization can fail miserably in a poetry lesson on ekphrasis.

This volume suggests ways to teach literature as literature more effectively. The exercises featured here have all been selected for their adaptability—their usefulness for teaching more than a single author or a single text. But you will also find among them useful approaches for teaching the idiosyncrasies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s language or Alexander Pope’s couplets, William Shakespeare’s soliloquies or Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, Jane Austen’s beginnings or Nella Larsen’s endings, Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms or N. Scott Momaday’s metaphors. Although most of the textual examples are drawn from literature in English or in translation, almost all of the exercises are appropriate for teaching literature in other languages as well. Several of the exercises are also designed to help students engage with critical and literary theory, or can be adapted to theoretical texts.

Good teachers know that, in the classroom, process is as important as content, which is why you’ll also find here a variety of methods and approaches, everything from exercises that deploy classic close-reading aids (circle, underline, annotate, imitate) to exercises that invite creative visualization techniques (write, draw, map, design). You’ll even find exercises that get students on their feet (debate, declaim, stage, perform), a process that truly brings out the active in active learning.

All of the exercises are also compatible with many of the classroom assessment techniques you may currently be incorporating into your lesson plans. Students who have already written short response papers or one-sentence summaries, for example, will be more than ready to dive into the active and practical exercises that populate this volume. You can also use common assessment techniques at the end of a lesson or a unit to gauge the success of these exercises at promoting better learning, or simply to get student feedback on the exercises. ¹² One of the most immediate and useful forms of assessment is to ask students directly, in the class time remaining, what they thought of the exercise itself: What did they learn or not learn from this activity? What was its greatest benefit or limitation? What are some changes they might recommend for repeating the lesson in the future? Can they imagine a useful follow-up exercise? Inviting students as a group to assess critically what you have just asked them to do constitutes an active learning exercise in its own right and is illustrated by many of the exercises in this volume.

Whether you are a new teacher finding your footing in the college classroom or a veteran faculty member on the lookout for new ideas, we hope The Pocket Instructor will be a useful resource at any moment you might need it. Designed for classes, seminars, and discussion sections, most of these classroom exercises take fifty minutes or less (nearly half can be completed in thirty minutes) and are versatile and flexible enough to be adjusted for different class sizes and for students with different skill sets. For example, a small-class exercise designed as a full-group discussion might, for a larger class, be reconfigured into a pair or small-group activity. (We define small group as three to five students working collaboratively.) Or an exercise designed for beginners might be combined with a second exercise of moderate difficulty to fashion a more challenging lesson plan. The best classroom learning activities tend to lend themselves readily to creative revision and resourceful repurposing. These are the exercises we have been most interested in showcasing.

The Pocket Instructor is not a guide to lecturing in the classroom. Though many of these active learning exercises require that the instructor introduce or model the activity at the beginning, summarize or clarify what the class has learned at the end, or provide some necessary orientation or information along the way, they do not rely on the traditional lecture format. We still believe in the large lecture format, for reasons both pedagogical and practical. There is a case to be made for the power of lectures to model for students the learning skills they seek to acquire. ¹³ And few schools, in any case, have the money, space, or resources to dispense entirely with traditional lecture courses. That said, it is worth remembering that lecturing and active learning strategies are not in fact mutually exclusive and that the two can even work in tandem. Spot writing, pair conversations, polls, clickers, and smart phones are all popular strategies for involving students more actively in even the largest of lecture halls. ¹⁴

For nonlecture classes (the focus of this volume) we suspect that many teachers of literature conduct their lessons in the same eclectic way we often do. For example, we might begin a class with some formal remarks to set things up or cover a bit of ground, then segue into a small-group or other collaborative exercise, next reconvene the class for a full-group discussion, and finally bring things to a close with a quick summary, a final question, or a brief look at what’s to come. Variety and pacing are the keys to holding student attention and making the most of classroom time. Yet while there may be more effective ways to teach, there is still no single correct way to teach. So much depends on our learning objectives, our class sizes, and even our physical classrooms, which are not always friendly environments for student dialogue and group activities.

At our own institution, the classrooms—many with heavy tables, bolted chairs, or tiered floors—are not properly set up for active learning exercises. And yet (perhaps like you) we try the exercises anyway, inevitably teaching not so much with the room as against it. Ideally, a classroom environment that encourages engaged student learning contains movable, reconfigurable furniture that can be instantly arranged and rearranged to accommodate small-group work. But in the absence of such popular flex rooms, nearly all of the exercises offered here can still be successfully executed by having students turn to the person next to them, reposition themselves, stand at the board, or move around the room. While most classroom designs have not caught up with the new pedagogy, we have found that exercises that involve students actively talking and learning from each other can still be pulled off, even in the most traditional of classrooms, with a little patience and creativity.

THE CLASSROOM EXERCISES

The Pocket Instructor is composed of eleven sections, each preceded by a short introduction that describes the general approach of that section and also explains how the exercises are organized within it. (We recommend that you read these section introductions before picking out a specific exercise to try.) We begin with a section called Discussions, since getting students talking is often the primary goal of active learning exercises. We follow up with another foundational section, Essentials, which identifies a handful of exercises that seem to work well in any literature classroom, whether the focus is genre, period, or theme. That said, because genre so often organizes literature courses—and in many cases determines which type of classroom activities are likely to succeed—we have allotted the largest sections of the volume to the three most frequently taught literary genres: stories, poems, and plays. These sections form the core of the volume, with fifteen exercises each, ranging from lessons appropriate for introductory survey courses to activities suitable for advanced courses. The six remaining sections focus attention on a range of other important topics, scales, and approaches. Genres and Canons explore the boundaries and conventions of literary forms and literary histories. Words and Styles tackle the nuances and subtleties of authorial expression. Pictures and Objects probe the rich visual and material contexts of imaginative literature. If it happens in a literary text, one of the exercises in these eleven sections will help your students understand it.

Each of the 101 entries assumes a two-part structure: precise step-by-step directions (Exercise) followed by more general ruminations (Reflections). Combining practical details with experiential advice, authors first share specific instructions for how to execute the actual lesson plans and then provide a peek into how things went in their classrooms. In concise, readable format, entries offer additional guideposts: clear rationales for the exercise itself, useful tips on what to do or what to avoid, helpful recommendations on what texts might work best, and thoughtful reflections on what students learned. Some entries even suggest variations on the main exercise—alternative approaches that, with a slight shift in method, might also work well for a different student group or pedagogical purpose.

All entries begin with a tagline that briefly describes the nature and purpose of the exercise: a collaborative exercise for finding the keywords in a novel (Word Clouds), an introductory exercise for listening to the distinctive sound of poetry (Close Listening), a slowing-down exercise for teaching the importance of style (The One-Liner). Immediately after the opening taglines, you will find the following nine navigational keys:

Genre (any, fiction, poetry, drama, prose)

Course Level (any, introductory, intermediate, advanced)

Student Difficulty (easy, moderate, hard)

Teacher Preparation (low, medium, high)

Class Size (any, small, medium, large)

Semester Time (any, first day, early, midterm, late, last day, exam review, all semester)

Writing Component (none, before class, in class, after class, optional)

Close Reading (none, low, medium, high)

Estimated Time (minutes, hours, full class)

These keys help identify the practical requirements of each exercise, and help you efficiently locate the type of exercise for which you may be searching.

For class size we have calculated a small class as one to fifteen students, a medium class as sixteen to thirty students, and a large class as more than thirty students. Roughly half the exercises are suitable for any class size; the rest work best with classes that are small or medium sized. The Estimated Time key denotes classroom time only and does not include the time it might take for students to complete homework or for groups to meet outside of class. Along with the Student Difficulty key, the Estimated Time key should also be considered more an estimate than a promise. Only you know your group, and only you can anticipate how long your students might need for the exercise and how easy or difficult it might be for them. These keys are intended to make that estimate easier.

Along with the keys that begin each exercise, cross-indexes at the end of each of the last nine sections offer additional pathways for exploring the volume. We have placed each of the exercises in the section where it most comfortably belongs, but many exercises are versatile enough to be cross-listed in multiple sections. For instance, not all the fiction exercises are in the Stories section; you will find many additional suitable options spread throughout the volume, in places like Words, Styles, or Pictures. These cross-indexes guide you to exercises that offer further activities for any section that sparks your interest. After the last section, four more cross-indexes are designed to help instructors plan ahead, highlighting exercises where timing matters (full semester, first day, last day) or exercises that require students to prepare writing before class. At the end of the volume you will also find a general index that includes literary authors, works, and related topics mentioned in the exercises.

TEACHING CLOSE READING

If there is a dominant theme across this collection of exercises, it is the many different and creative ways to teach close reading. Close reading is the art of attending to the details of a text (its structure, diction, tone, syntax, sound, imagery, theme), often as a way to identify or understand its larger cultural, historical, or literary contexts. This approach, first developed as a practice in the 1920s by Cambridge scholars I. A. Richards and William Empson before making its way across the Atlantic, remains central to the literature classroom of the twenty-first century. ¹⁵ Indeed, the skill of close reading is uniquely suited to a postindustrial world defined by networks, connections, and relationships. Finding patterns and identifying themes is the very work of close reading, for which students of literature have a special affinity and training. One might assume that teaching the art of close reading always happens in the same fashion, but in fact there are many approaches to scanning a line, mapping a structure, or identifying a theme. The exercises in this volume capture just some of the imaginative ways that close reading might be deployed as a constructive critical practice.

The practice of reading closely is so pervasive across literary genres, and so common a thread in active learning exercises, that at first we wondered if we even needed a separate key for it. In the end we decided in favor of a Close Reading key to recognize and highlight, across exercises, the great diversity and varying degrees of close reading deployed in the literature classroom, techniques that might extend anywhere from registering the significance of a text’s general external appearance (Judge a Book by Its Cover) to attending to its every internal punctuation mark (Punctuation Matters). Some exercises in this volume are entirely close reading activities that lean heavily on micro analysis of single texts (The Blow Up or The Cut Up), while others widen out to encompass more macro strategies for understanding the formal intricacies and patterns across texts and periods (First Paragraphs or Moving Scenes). Still others seek to complement or counterbalance formalist reading practices by inviting students to contextualize either historically (Digital Literacy) or culturally (Spin the Globe, Shakespeare). There are even some exercises in this collection that require no close reading at all, focusing instead on what happens either before (Reading without Reading) or after (Build-A-Canon) engagement with the text proper. In the final analysis, however, few exercises in the literature classroom are very far from the details of language, style, or voice that mark a text as literary. Judging from the sheer volume of exercises in this collection that rely on the technique of annotation or other forms of explication, literary studies continue to put a high premium on close reading as a core foundational skill for the understanding and interpretation of texts.

Whichever activities you use, you will find in these entries not hard-and-fast rules but creative and crafty inspiration—prompts for pedagogical experimentation and innovation in your own classroom. We invite you to try these exercises as they are, to reimagine them for your own audience, or to use them as incentives to pilot something new. No one owns a good teaching exercise; favorite classroom activities are not copyrighted but shared. As teaching seminars and teaching centers continue to crop up in colleges and universities around the country, and as the profession rededicates itself to the fundamentals of good teaching, now seems the appropriate time for all of us to share favorite lesson plans on a larger scale.

NOTES

1. Scott Carlson, The Net Generation Goes to College, Chronicle of Higher Education 52.7 (October 7, 2005), A34–A37.

2. On the movement from an industrial economy to an information economy and its particular influence on the classroom, see Paul Cornell’s The Impact of Changes in Teaching and Learning on Furniture and the Learning Environment, New Directions for Teaching and Learning 2002.92 (2002), 33–42. As he marks this important historical change, Cornell identifies additional pedagogical shifts—from directed learning to facilitated learning, passive learning to active learning, learning content only to learning content and process, and working alone to working alone and together.

3. For more on the new learning paradigms emerging in the Information Age, see Daniel Araya and Michael A. Peters, eds., Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). Of particular note: Greg Hearn and Ruth Bridgstock, Education for the Creative Economy: Innovation, Transdisciplinarity, and Networks (93–116), and Patrick Whitney, Learning in the Creative Economy (447–68).

4. Charles C. Bonwell and James A. Eison, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1 (Washington, DC: George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development, 1991), 2.

5. Chet Meyers and Thomas B. Jones, Promoting Active Learning: Strategies for the College Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), 6.

6. As Meyers and Jones rightly note, we know that unless students actually use and appropriate ideas and information, they will not retain them (34). For a useful survey of the early research on active learning, see R. T. Johnson and D. W. Johnson, An Overview of Cooperative Learning, in Creativity and Collaborative Learning, ed. J. Thousand, A. Villa, and A. Nevin (Baltimore: Brookes Press, 1994), 31–44. More recent endorsements of active learning pedagogy include S. D. Brookfield and S. Preskill, Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999); L. D. Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003); Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Elizabeth F. Barkley, K. Patricia Cross, and Claire Howell Major, Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004); J. C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: A Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011); and Maryellen Weimer, Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013).

7. See Barbara Gross Davis, Diversity and Complexity in the Classroom: Considerations of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender, in her Tools for Teaching, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 39–51.

8. For an excellent review of the most influential scientific research on cognition, learning, and teaching, see James G. Greeno, Allan M. Collins, and Lauren B. Resnick, Cognition and Learning, in Handbook of Educational Psychology, ed. David C. Berliner and Robert C. Calfee (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 15–46. And for a more recent study of learning techniques based on this research (techniques like summarizing, highlighting, rereading, and identifying keywords), see John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham, Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology, Association for Psychological Science 14.1 (2013), 4–58.

9. Wilbert J. McKeachie and Marilla Svinicki, McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, 14th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2014; orig. pub. 1950); Anne Curzan and Lisa Damour, First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011; orig. pub. 2000); and Barbara Gross Davis’s Tools for Teaching, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2009; orig. pub. 2001).

10. Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), vii.

11. Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 95–97.

12. For a thorough discussion of the philosophy and practice of classroom assessment technique (CAT), including fifty sample CATs, see Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993). And for a more recent discussion of how rubrics might be used in classroom assessment, see Dannell D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi, Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning, 2nd ed. (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2012).

13. Abigail Walthausen, Don’t Give Up on the Lecture, Atlantic Monthly (November 21, 2013), available in the archives of the Atlantic, http://theatlantic.com/education, last accessed February 23, 2015.

14. For additional ideas on making lectures more interactive, see Frank Heppner, Teaching the Large College Class: A Guidebook for Instructors with Multitudes (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), especially chapters 5 (Using Media Effectively) and 6 (Auditorium Classroom Activities), 67–98, and Linda B. Nilson, Making the Lecture a Learning Experience, in her Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 113–25.

15. See I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), and Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1929), and William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), three founding texts in the history of close reading. A recent reconsideration of the discontinuous evolution of close reading in the British and American traditions reminds us that we may know much less about the early philosophies of close reading practices than we think we do. It was not the case that literary critics like I. A. Richards or William Empson idolized the text at the expense of authors, readers, and contexts; on the contrary, their experiments in textual close reading sought to shed light on these very subjects. See Joseph North’s interesting What’s ‘New Critical’ about ‘Close Reading’?: I. A. Richards and His New Critical Reception, New Literary History 44.1 (Winter 2013), 141–57.

DISCUSSIONS

Active learning almost always starts with getting students talking. The exercises in this opening section—which include several classic activities with time-honored track records—are designed to do just that. Ranging from a simple around-the-room discussion starter (with a twist) that will work in any classroom, to more complex and in some cases multistage group activities, these exercises are designed to train students in the critical skills that make for effective, even transformative, classroom conversation: how to enter a discussion, how to listen to your peers, how to frame a useful question, how to develop a supportable argument, and how to work together to create an illuminating analytical synthesis.

The section begins with three general, easily adaptable exercises. The Sixty Second Game and Fishbowl involve everyone quickly and help normalize a discussion-based classroom in which all are counted on to contribute, while Read, Reread, Close Read creates a community of careful readers through close listening. All three exercises model discussion as a collaborative activity rather than a sequence of loosely related comments funneled through the instructor. The next three activities use the students’ own questions to organize discussion, whether those questions are prepared ahead of time, as in Put the Question and It’s Time We Talked, or generated during class itself, as in Reverse Entropy. Each exercise in this set also helps students recognize what makes a good question in the first place. The final two activities, Debate and Leader, Skeptic, Scribe, turn from pointed questions to arguable answers, asking students to produce and defend interpretive claims about literary texts. Adaptable to any genre and almost any class size, these eight exercises will help turn even the quietest students into lively, engaged participants.

The Sixty Second Game

Vanessa L. Ryan

A classic around-the-room discussion starter with a twist.

Genre: any

Course Level: any

Student Difficulty: easy

Teacher Preparation: low

Class Size: small

Semester Time: any, especially midterm

Writing Component: optional

Close Reading: none to low

Estimated Time: 20 minutes

EXERCISE

Bring a timer to class—a kitchen timer with a bell, or a phone or tablet with a timer application—and introduce your students to The Sixty Second Game. In this classic one minute around the table discussion starter, each student has exactly sixty seconds to comment on the day’s reading: no more, no less. The twist is the timer: even if a student is in the middle of a sentence when the bell rings, move on to the next person. Students who complete their comments before the clock is up can recite the alphabet to finish the time (though students usually find they have another thought to share instead).

After you explain the ground rules, invite the students to use their sixty seconds to discuss their favorite or most challenging moment, make a connection to another reading in the course, or comment on a previous student’s reflection. Go around the room in order, so that everyone knows when he or she is next. As each student speaks, write a keyword or phrase on the board that captures a salient aspect of each contribution. Group the comments as you record them, underlining observations that are made multiple times, but do not interject your own responses: let the students do all the talking until everyone has had a chance to speak.

Once all the contributions are on the board, open discussion for follow-up comments. Now your own voice can emerge as well. If you like, continue to use the board to track the discussion. At the end of class, return to the board to show students how their insights took shape: pull out the most valuable shared interests, highlighting the larger claims that emerged from their original comments.

REFLECTIONS

This exercise adds a gamelike element to the classroom, and shifts the energy from the instructor to the students. The buzzer makes the exercise fun and leads to a fair amount of laughter; I find that students feel a shared camaraderie as they fight the clock and are saved by the bell. The key is for the instructor to refrain from speaking for the first twenty minutes or so of class. (The length will vary depending on how many students you have; for larger classes, you can shorten the time for each initial comment to forty-five or even thirty seconds.) Putting keywords and phrases on the board as each student speaks validates and reinforces each student’s comment. (For beginning students, it also models the process of note taking.) It is essential to write something on the board for each student.

This exercise is particularly successful when you anticipate a set of groupings in which the initial comments might fall, and then use different quadrants of the board to record those groupings. (For example, you might reserve one quadrant for observations about form, another for comments about themes, another for connections to other works, and so on.) This will also allow you to add any topic you think the discussion has missed, or to dedicate one area of the board to an aspect of the text you want to concentrate on for the rest of the class hour. Anticipating these groupings helps you not only to organize the comments but also to demonstrate later to students how their larger claims took shape. Students are always surprised when you show them that what looks like a messy board actually has an underlying structure, which helps them see that even a freewheeling discussion leads to broader insights.

For example, in a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Hysteria in a senior seminar, The Sixty Second Game allowed students to voice their initial reactions to the work—some impassioned—and begin the complex work of understanding and analyzing together, without my intervention. As we went around the room, students began with their first responses, particularly what they saw as Freud’s coercive interpretations of Dora. Students quickly turned the discussion to consider questions of method, interpretation, and narrative technique, especially Freud’s storytelling. Each time a student echoed a thought already on the board, I underlined the original comment. When a student mentioned a central term of psychoanalysis, I put a box around it to mark it as a key term (case study, transference, unconscious). After allowing additional time for follow-up comments, I began by reviewing the key terms in boxes, adding one (dream work): the board showed that as a group, the students had together identified the central concepts that structured Freud’s text.

During the exercise, I had written comments on Freud’s interpretations of Dora on one side of the board, and comments capturing our interpretations of Freud and his method on the other. On both sides, I put more negative comments on the top and more positive comments on the bottom. I was then able to reveal the parallels between Freud’s dream work and our interpretive reading process simply by drawing arrows connecting both sides of the board. The top and bottom halves of the board also showed us that Freud’s reading of Dora and our readings of Freud were both—not unlike Dora herself—participating in a process of identification and resistance. Students left class with ownership over a key insight into the way analysis, whether psychoanalytic or literary, is a constructive process.

The Sixty Second Game achieves a number of important goals: all students participate, long-winded students learn to be concise, and reserved students learn to expand on their comments. It can be used at any time in the course but often works best at midsemester or after, when students feel confident about the nature and direction of the course. For a particularly reserved group of students, you could add a sixty-second prewriting component before starting the exercise. The Sixty Second Game can be a great way to clear the air, before heading into more structured discussion, for texts that students have strong opinions about (for example, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or the conclusion to George Eliot’s Middlemarch). It also works particularly well with capacious and challenging works: one of my best experiences using The Sixty Second Game was in a class on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a first-year seminar. I have found that students often take pictures of the board at the end of class, amazed and excited by what they have come up with.

Fishbowl

Ellen M. Bayer

A small-group exercise in which students take turns at the center—literally—of the conversation.

Genre: any

Course Level: any

Student Difficulty: easy

Teacher Preparation: low

Class Size: any

Semester Time: any

Writing Component: none

Close Reading: medium

Estimated Time: variable, 30 to 60 minutes

EXERCISE

This classic retreat exercise and popular teaching strategy adapts particularly well to the literature classroom. To prepare, develop a series of questions related to the text you will cover during the next class meeting. Questions that are open to a range of possible interpretations will lead to more productive conversations: Who would you identify as the protagonist in Bartleby? What is Sethe’s motivation for killing her daughter in Beloved? How do you