Classroom Activity

Incorporating collaborative classroom activities which are both instructive and engaging can be challenging. One way to do that is to use an activity similar to the one I describe below.

I use an RSS feed to pull together posts from various blogs across the internet that I find interesting.  One of those is from Lolly Daskal. She usually posts interesting material, but it is often light on application.  One of her more recent posts was titled: 10 Vital Traits to Look for in People You Hire. As you can imagine, the points she lists are accurate but too shallow to make an application.  As a classroom activity, however, I could use this list in a couple of ways:

1. I could emphasize the importance to setting up an RSS feed (I use Bloglovin but there are many which do the same thing and almost all are free) and to pull together some favorite blogs for collection. This promotes self-development and ongoing-learning, a skill that will be vital for everyone in the days ahead. Check out this post about these feeders.
2. I would use a specific post like the one above and parcel it out to groups in the class and ask them to explain how to determine whether or not a trait exists in a job candidate. For instance, one of her 10 vital traits was that the individual must have a growth mindset. You may be aware of the book Mindset in which Carol Dweck explains the virtues of the growth mindset and the differences and advantages over the fixed mindset (excellent book and I highly recommend it). I would challenge the group with this assignment to find out about the growth mindset, if they don’t already know, and then determine ways in an interview to discover if the candidate had a growth mindset.
3. Alternately, you could post large pages of paper around the room and list the 10 traits on per page and have the groups rotate from page to page every couple of minutes adding their thoughts to how to find out if that trait is present.

There are a LOT of good resources available to draw upon to enrich your class and engage your students.  If you would like to know more or have questions, please contact me (rupchurch@belhaven.edu) or Dr, Kim Priesmeyer, Dean of the Center for Teaching and Learning (kpriesmeyer@belhaven.edu).