Syllabus Scavenger Hunt: An Interactive Way to Review the Syllabus
It’s not always the most fun part of the first day of class, but we often need to review the syllabus. Students need to know the rules, how their grades will be calculated, and the outline of the course. If you don’t go over it in class, they won’t read it on their own. Even if they do review it on their own, they may have questions! But if you lecture at them, they tend to get bored, get distracted, and forget. If you pep up your syllabus review with jokes and personal stories, they remember those stories forever. Not so much the important stuff. This is why I love the Syllabus Scavenger Hunt!
I don’t think anything engages the brain and helps students memorize more than making them do the work, and making it fun. A Syllabus Scavenger Hunt does just that! Instead of reading the syllabus and having students follow along, maybe interrupt with questions that you were about to answer anyway, in a Syllabus Scavenger Hunt, you hand out the syllabus and a sheet of questions. You might also format your questions as unfinished notes. Be sure the questions highlight the most important information students need to know about your class.
Typically students need to know:
- How their grade is calculated
- Due dates for large projects
- Dates of exams or big tests
- Lateness, absence, and sickness policies
- Any unique expectations for your class
You may also think about questions you’ve gotten in the past or situations that commonly occur. When I used to teach a class first thing in the morning, students would often be a few minutes late. So I was sure to set a clear policy on how late was late and I added that to my syllabus. There were also questions about whether they could eat and drink in class. I had to institute some rules because kids were bringing in greasy egg sandwiches or claiming they couldn’t take notes while they ate! Another IEP I worked at had a lot of Saudi Arabian students. There were always questions about Ramadan: Is Eid an excused absence? Can we ask other students not to eat or drink in class during Ramadan?
You can also Google “syllabus scavenger hunt” to find examples and get ideas. I particularly like this one, this one, and this post with example questions as well as tips.
Students then read the syllabus and fill in the answers themselves. Because they are doing the work themselves, they are more likely to be engaged and to remember. And when they are done, they will have a cheat sheet to your syllabus, a one-page summary with the most important information clearly marked (It may seem a bit crazy that students need this, but remember, they are language learners. Some syllabuses get pretty dense with all that text, and boilerplate language from the administration).
Variations on syllabus scavenger hunt
As an alternative, you can put students in groups to work together and help each other. This is particularly good for lower-levels or very dense multi-page syllabuses (I’m looking at you, university classes). You can even assign each student one question and then put them in groups to tell each other the answers. You could make it a relay race, where students must run across the classroom to get each new question. Or even turn it into a timed race and see which student or group can answer all the questions first.
However you run the Syllabus Scavenger Hunt, be sure to go over the answers and make sure everyone is on the same page. And be sure to take questions after. Hopefully at this point the questions will be things NOT on the syllabus already. And if a student does ask a question such as, “What if I get sick while I’m on vacation, but the vacation wasn’t an excused absence, and the next day is the first day of spring break?” they have a place to jot down the answer.
Download an editable syllabus scavenger hunt
Download an Editable Syllabus Scavenger Hunt (DOC) from this resource page for Classroom Community Builders by Walton Burns. It’s based on one I used at an IEP. You’ll have to change it to reflect your own syllabus, which is why I let you download it as a Word Doc.
And find more first day of class/back to school advice including creating your own DIY Classroom Community Builders and even warmers for online classes!
How to Structure Online Chats for Better Participation
Blended learning has gone mainstream. Once upon a time, classes that were conducted both online and face-to-face were taught by professors with IT experience. However, it seems that all teachers are expected to be able to teach with technology now. This expectation doesn’t always meet reality as face-to-face teaching techniques don’t always translate to your online teaching platform, Internet forums, social media, or chats and messaging. In fact, as Sharon Hartle, author of Keeping the Essence in Sight and experienced online teacher says, we really should call it blended teaching, not blended learning. It’s really the teacher’s job to adjust teaching methods to the format.
One aspect of blended teaching (or blended learning) is the conducting discussions online. Many teachers, including Sharon, enjoy having a chance to chat in real-time, even if it’s over the computer. However, if you don’t structure online chats, they can be difficult to follow.
This is particularly true if they’re done over Twitter, HootCourse (which Sharon prefers as it allows you to create a private chatroom), or a similar messaging app. First, you must have a way of ensuring everyone can “hear” each other. Second, because each participant is in their own room, people tend to type simultaneously. Third, different people use different software and websites to track discussions. Each method updates at a different pace. So the participants aren’t always seeing all the responses as soon as they happen.
The result is people “talking” over each other, typing without being able to read all the responses. Others respond to old messages, which may or may not be clear. Quickly the conversation turns into several isolated threads with only a few participants each. One solution is to have students read the transcript later, but this defeats the purpose of a simultaneous chat.
Rules to Structure Online Chats
So Sharon proposes the structured chat. In a structured online chat, the moderator, likely you, the teacher, types a topic or poses a question. Participants may respond only to this question. This ensures that everyone is on-topic. After a set amount of time, or when discussion dies out, the moderator can pose a second question. And so on.
Note that the questions may come from the textbook, the readings, an activity students have already been doing, or the teacher. But students may also have proposed them before the chat. Or evolve naturally from the chat. Having a moderator doesn’t necessarily mean the teacher is the sole dictator of the topics of discussion.
And if you share the questions in advance, students can prepare answers and cut-and-paste them into the chat. This reduces their “talking” time, leaving them more time to read other responses.
If students want to raise a different question, or shift the topic, they can raise their hands virtually. To do this, participants agree on a signal that means “hand raised/I have a question.” The question mark (?) is a great signal. You can also agree on a particular emoji (say, victory hand ✌). When the moderator sees this signal, they can write, “Ali has a question. Please post it now.” This tells the other students to stop typing and to pay attention to Ali’s feed.
One technique I’ve seen used in online chats is to have every participant use a particular hashtag so that everyone who wants to participate can follow that hashtag. Another trick is for the moderator to number the questions. The respondent then answers with the same number, like this:
This ensures that everyone is answering the same question and that it is immediately clear if someone is responding to an earlier question, either because they want to bring up a new point or their tweets are loading slowly. Feel free to share your ideas to structure online chats in the comments.