To start things off, I thought I would post a reaction I had to Chapter 1, "Retrieving," on page 39: here Lang discusses the "reluctance [many facutly have] at the use of regular quizzing because they feel it infantalizes the students or changes the atmosphere of the classroom from one of shared learning and discussion to one of testing and evaluation. I had those exact same feelings about quizzing when I began my teaching career. I just wanted to engage in interesting discussions with my students about literature and not impede our relationship with heavy-handed tactis like quizzing and testing. Dude."
Like Lang, I am very ambivalent about quizzing--I frankly don't do it. However, I give my students daily questions to respond to on a blog (like this one) and often give them an in-class writing prompt/quiz which is more about responding to something they read rather than knowing facts and figures. I find that many classes don't lend themselves to quizzing unless we're learning technical information, and in a literature class, it becomes more about the trivia of plot details, etc. BUT, if you don't quiz students often feel they don't have to read and can bluff their way through the class--or simply copy the powerpoint, etc. It's hard to know how to tell students they're being held to a high standard of work/study while also not making it feel like obligatory busy work to keep them on task.
Q: What do others do? How do you 'test' a class to make sure they've done the required reading or learned material they were supposed to engage with outside of class in that crucial first 10 minutes or so of class?
[feel free to post your responses as a comment to this post OR make your own post to tell a related story. I added everyone's ECU e-mail address to this blog to make you an administrator, but if it doesn't work and you can't post, please let me know!).
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