Over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending a good bit of time pacing through the rows to see what my students were surfing for (but without calling them out for being on “wrong” websites). Interestingly, I’ve found that my students are surfing the web throughout the class period (okay, no shock there), but they aren’t goofing off. Those that I’ve thought were on “bad” websites and asked them to answer a question were starting their answer with “well, the website I was just looking at says…” I was excited. After spending half a semester going against my own policy of not calling students out during class, I’ve found that they are using their time constructively. (WOW! I’m impressed.)

But in addition to that, we spent the last day of class creating an Annotated Bibliography entry in the style that they would be using for their own annotated bibliography. For the past few weeks, they’ve been discussing Ashley X in class. So I’ve promised them that I would use this as the “topic” I was covering for the Ashley X issue and so everything that they would be doing for their own papers, I would be doing in class with them (using Ashley) to provide them with more concrete examples. So yesterday we did the first part of this assignment–the Annotated Bibliography entry. It went well–all my students participated (much more than they normally do) and were not only engaged in the assignment, but were actively participating in the class. My 9:30 students were even reading over the sample my 8:00 class created so they could better prepare their own.

So class has gotten a lot better in the last few days. Now, I just have to figure out what I need to do if I want to get them this active in the first two units I taught. Hmmm….more thoughts later.