GLH1 Preparation, Implementation, Assessment, & Additional Considerations

 Preparation

To prepare for "It's Snowing" in-person option:

Instructors of in-person courses will need the following facilities and materials: 

  • A space in which students can move around. This can be done in the classroom, in a hallway or other safe common area, outside, etc.  
  • One sheet of paper and writing implement per student 
  • Something with which to keep time 

To prepare for Six-Word Memoirs® virtual option: 

Instructors will determine toward what end they will use this topic (see description), whether or not students will be given a prompt in advance or during the class, and how they would like to share the students Six-Word Memoir – if synchronously, will they share in breakout rooms, in the main room, through the chat, on a shared doc? If the exercise was done asynchronously before a synchronous virtual session, the instructor will determine how to facilitate a conversation during class time.  

Instructors should prepare a slide with basic instructions and an example. (See example) 

 Implementation

"It's Snowing" in-person option

Instructors will: 

  1. Determine 2-4 questions about a topic that make sense for their students and class context.  
  2. Instruct students to divide a sheet of paper into the number of questions you have chosen  and not to put their name on the paper 
  3. Tell them they will write their responses to questions in the areas of the paper and that they will not be the only person to see their responses.  
  4. Ask the students the questions and instruct them to put their responses in certain locations on the paper so all of the papers have the responses in the same areas. For example, if there are 4 questions, response 1 goes in the upper left corner, response 2  in the upper right, and so forth.  
  5. Ask the questions (providing them on a PPT or other visual may be helpful) and give the students an appropriate amount of time to answer them.  
  6. Once all of the students are done answering, ask them to take their papers and move to a pre-determined open area.  
  7. Instruct the students to ball up their papers and on your command to throw them up in the air, pick up another ball of paper and throw it into the air, moving around the room from ball of paper to ball of paper until you tell them to stop.  
  8. Give the students 30 secs to 1 minute to throw papers into the air until the  papers are sufficiently jumbled up and laying on the floor. The physical movement can be energizing.  
  9. Instruct the students to pick up the ball of paper closest to them. Give them sufficient time to read it.  
  10. Emphasizing that it is not a race and that speed is not a part of the activity,  instruct the students to walk around for a pre-determined amount of time, perhaps 10-15  minutes, posing questions to their classmates to try to find the owner of the paper. For example. If a question was, “What was a  new experience you had while traveling in or outside of your home country” and the answer was “I played the game Cornhole during my first week living in Indiana”, a student could ask, “Are you new to Indiana and did you learn to play Cornhole after you moved here?” 
  11. Tell students that once they have found the owner of the paper they picked up they can take 2-3 minute to talk about each of their responses to the questions and then, if the other student hasn’t also found the owner of the paper they picked up, that they should end their conversation and let the other student keep looking. The first student can help the 2nd student look and they can all discuss the answer to their questions together.  
  12. When time is up, the instructor should call the students together for a debrief.  
  13. Provide 5-8 minutes for volunteers to for students to introduce their partners using their responses to the question and/or to share their own responses to the questions.  
  14. During the debrief, ask questions such as “What did you learn about others in the class? How will what you learn influence how you engage with others in this class? What did you learn about yourself from reading and listening to the responses of others.  

Six-Word Memoirs® - Virtual option: 

Instructors will: 

  1. Tell students that their goal is to communicate their thoughts on a specific topic in only 6 words.  
  2. If this is being done synchronously, provide students with an appropriate amount of time to draft their language during class. Up to 5 minutes is sufficient depending on the class and the topic.  
  3. Then, instructors will ask for volunteers to share and can either sum up similarities and differences across the class or point out themes that arose across the “memoirs” 

 Assessment

For “It’s Snowing”, the debrief questions posed at the end of the activity can serve as a reflection and can assess what the students learned about themselves and others.  

 Additional Considerations

Interactive activities pose multiple levels of risk to students – low, medium, high. To learn more about levels of risk in interactive activities, see the “Developing an Inclusive Environment”  PPT in the Examples section.  

The name “It’s Snowing”, can be changed to something that resonates with the instructor and class context. For example, an instructor could  rename it to “It’s Raining” “Meteor Shower”, “Popcorn”, etc.  

If there are students with physical or visual limitations in the class, make sure that you accommodate them as you are planning this activity. For example, a identify a human guide for visually-impaired students or sufficient space for a person with a wheel chair to move around.  

The instructor can participate along with the students.  

This COULD be modified to be a virtual activity using a shared doc or a collaborative platform.  

While the idea behind Six-Word Memoirs® is related to “short life stories”, it does not have to be used to describe an individual’s life. Instructors can be imaginative in how they use the main idea of this activity.