{"id":25,"date":"2019-04-22T23:04:02","date_gmt":"2019-04-23T06:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/teachingexcellence\/?p=25"},"modified":"2019-04-29T14:29:27","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T21:29:27","slug":"afterthoughts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/teachingexcellence\/2019\/04\/22\/afterthoughts-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Afterthoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

My post today is about a cool article I read<\/a> on a low-stakes type of writing assignment that I think could be wildly helpful to my students. Julie Empric calls this assignment, \u201cAfterthoughts<\/a>.\u201d In short, Afterthoughts eliminate the brain dump that often occurs at precisely the time when students exit the classroom.<\/strong> Instead, students are asked to interact with the material in ways they may not have previously. I think this technique, described below, is very much in line with the Cognitively Active (deep learning)<\/strong> study approaches that I presented last week.<\/p>\n

In short, the Afterthoughts assignment has students write about what happened in the class session<\/strong>. From this template<\/a>, the Afterthought should:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. follow-up on an important point covered in class,<\/li>\n
  2. raise questions about what was discussed in class,<\/li>\n
  3. link ideas presented in several different class sessions,<\/li>\n
  4. correct, adjust, or extend an Afterthought someone else presented in class, or<\/li>\n
  5. connect course content with something on TV, a film, the Internet, in a book, with content from another course, or with something the student experienced.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    You, the instructor, can then use these Afterthoughts as conversation-starters or discussion topics in class or online, have students respond to them online (Canvas has an EXCELLENT Discussion tool), and or, as part of a larger assignment where students compile their Afterthoughts into one end-of-class graded assignment.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s how it might go (from Empric\u2019s \u201cAfterthoughts<\/a>\u201d):<\/p>\n