Weekly check-in
Every week, after you finish working through the content, I want to hear about what you learned and what questions you still have. Because the content in thsi course is flipped, these questions are crucial for our weekly in-class discussions.
To encourage engagement with the course content—and to allow me to collect the class’s questions each week—you’ll need to fill out a short response on iCollege. This should be ≈150 words. That’s fairly short: there are ≈250 words on a typical double-spaced page in Microsoft Word (500 when single-spaced).
These check-ins are due by noon on the days we have class. This is so I can look through the responses and start structuring the discussion for the evening’s class.
You should answer these two questions each week:
- What were the three (3) most interesting or exciting things you learned from the session? Why?
- What were the three (3) muddiest or unclear things from the session this week? What are you still wondering about?
You can include more than three interesting or muddiest things, but you must include at least three. There should be six easily identifiable things in each check-in: three exciting things and three questions.
I will grade these check-ins using a check system:
- ✔+: (11.5 points (115%) in gradebook) Response shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
- ✔: (10 points (100%) in gradebook) Response is thoughtful, well-written, and shows engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
- ✔−: (5 points (50%) in gradebook) Response is hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.
Notice that is essentially a pass/fail or completion-based system. I’m not grading your writing ability, I’m not counting the exact number of words you’re writing, and I’m not looking for encyclopedic citations of every single reading to prove that you did indeed read everything. I’m looking for thoughtful engagement, three interesting things, and three questions. That’s all. Do good work and you’ll get a ✓.
You will submit these check-ins via iCollege.