An Index Card a Day
I teach six college English classes per semester, so I often find myself overwhelmed with preparation and grading. This semester, I wanted to cut down the amount of paper I was distributing and collecting as well as the supplies I needed hold group activities, so I grabbed a box of index cards. Not only have I cut down on paper use, but I’ve also been able to improve my classroom management skills and increase student participation. I doubt these are original ideas, but I hope they will inspire creative thought about facilitation. Here are a few ways I’m using index cards in the classroom:
1. To Hold Group Discussion — Without the Discussion.
I used to divide my literature students into groups and assign discussion questions. They were to answer the questions and then present their thoughts to the class. Instead, student’s would either pull out their cell phones and avoid the work entirely, or give the bare minimum effort while also mumbling “This is stupid” or “I don’t feel like doing this discussion” or simply mocking the style and content of my questions. I knew I needed a way to hold them more accountable.
Now, I give each student an index card at the top of class and ask that they write down discussion questions and a quote from the reading. Sometimes I have them come up the questions and other times I have them pull from the list given at the end of that reading in the textbook. I take up the cards and re-distribute them at random, and each student writes a response to the information on their card. There are so many ways to facilitate this activity. You can re-distribute the cards several times so that each student answers multiple questions or ask them to respond directly to another student’s answer to a question and continue the exchange. You can create pairs with this exchange or even organize the students into groups and have them keep a written dialogue going by passing around a card.
What I especially like about this method is that it gets students to identify the discussion questions they want to answer. It decreases the amount of preparation you have to do for class and in turn gives you more license to call on students individually because they wrote the questions in the first place. And hey, if they don’t want to answer, you can ask “Well then why did you write this question in the first place?” and shift to a discussion about how and why we prioritize certain information when we read and write.
2. To Give a Reading Quiz
Have each student write a discussion question and a quote from the reading on the index card and then collect and re-distribute them. Inform students that the question and quote on the card they receive is their quiz material and then give additional length and content guidelines for their responses.
3. To Teach Revision, Particularly Eliminating Wordiness
The first writing assignment I give in my English 101 classes is a summary and response. The student’s read an essay in the textbook and then write a summary paragraph and a response paragraph to give them practice with evaluating a text as well as incorporating information from sources into their own writing. In class, I ask them to re-write these paragraphs on an index card. This way they are forced to be concise because they are working with limited space. I then take them up and re-distribute them at random for the students to peer review.
4. To Teach MLA Formatting
While citation generators have students mindlessly copy/pasting citations onto a works cited page, I remain old-fashioned and require that they learn to format them manually in class in order to get them to pay attention to the core elements that determine the credibility of a source. To make it more interesting, I created a citation formatting relay game using index cards. Each card has a piece of a citation on it, like an author’s last name or the title of a source. In teams, the students compete to see which team can assemble the complete citation the fastest. I have them attach the cards to the whiteboard with magnet clips. I also laminated the cards so they would hold up for use in multiple classes.