What are In-Class Participation Assignments?
"Please take out a notecard!" Students in my political science courses [2] hear this refrain nearly every class meeting. The recognition that they will soon be engaged in another in-class participation assignment--one of twenty completed over the course of the semester--is immediate. By building-in these assignments as a regular component of the course structure, norms for student behavior begin to crystallize by the third week of class. The students do not groan or sigh or give any other sort of outward indication that they expect the next minute or two of writing to be a waste of time or particularly onerous. Rather, a feeling of energy and anticipation seems to sweep through the classroom. The students produce a notecard, write their name in the upper-left corner and the assignment number in the upper-right, and then await the prompt.
The original motivation for these in-class participation assignments came from my experiences as a graduate student in political science at a large research university, where I learned about teaching in two ways: as a participant in training sessions on the active learning model and as a teaching assistant in large lecture classes. …