{"id":3292,"date":"2020-03-03T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/?p=3292"},"modified":"2020-03-23T14:48:08","modified_gmt":"2020-03-23T19:48:08","slug":"predicting-as-a-hook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/predicting-as-a-hook\/","title":{"rendered":"Predicting as a hook"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I\u2019m always looking for ways to improve my teaching\u2014that is, to improve the learning my students signed up for. So it\u2019s handy to be part of a faculty learning community that comes together to read Small Teaching <\/em>by James Lang. Chapter 2 is about \u201cpredicting.\u201d Lang suggests that if we ask learners to make predictions about upcoming content, theory, or practice, for instance, we are giving them opportunities to increase both knowledge and understanding. This is because prediction activities can strategically engage a learner\u2019s curiosity and emotional connections to the subject. I can even just spur students to pay attention (p. 43).<\/p>\n

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A few weeks into Teaching the Writing Process, a 300-level
\ncourse to train writers to be writing tutors, we have what I call Composition
\nTheory Day. I present a framework many writing critics use to analyze and
\nevaluate writing. Pretty dry sounding, right? Well, when I previewed the
\n\u201cPredicting\u201d chapter from Small Teaching<\/em>,
\nI knew I could do something different to better engage my students\u2019 attention,
\ncuriosity, and even emotions. Then maybe the lesson wouldn\u2019t be so, well,
\nlesson-y.<\/p>\n

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I brought to class several sticky-note pads. I asked the
\nstudents to write on individual sticky notes all the different things people
\nwrite. They came up with emails, plays, business plans, research papers, book
\nreviews, poems, and plenty more. Then I split them in groups of three to
\ncategorize their post-its. Their only instructions were to group like-writings
\ntogether\u2014and they went along with my experiment of not telling them what specific
\ncategories to create. They had to create categories based what they saw in
\nfront of themselves. They gathered the notes into groups and on a new sticky
\nnote named the category. <\/p>\n

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One group gathered their sticky notes in columns, the other in bunches.<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

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The debrief was fascinating. Not only did they name similar categories different things, but they made up their own rules for categorizing. While one group put \u201cpoems\u201d in a \u201cCreative Writing\u201d category, another put the three post-its stating \u201cpoem\u201d in three different categories. It didn\u2019t matter to me; I wanted them to experience thinking through categorizing something they were familiar with in order to be prepared to see how professionals might do a similar thing. They created categories such as Personal, Business Writing, Information Writing, Communication, and the intriguing Position-Based Writing. But content-wise, it didn\u2019t matter to me what they called things. I wanted them to experience a process that would position them to engage with new ideas, those dry writing theory ones, with interest.<\/p>\n

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Since they knew it was an experiment, I later asked the
\nstudents how it went:<\/p>\n

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