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Sherry Linkon, a professor of English and American studies at Georgetown University, described an approach she developed years ago, after students told her that when they struggle with a text, they often rely on class discussions to clarify their confusion.
Linkon created what she calls a framing document, a low-pressure, ungraded approach to encourage students to consider what questions the reading raises for them. “Students have regularly told me this is one of their favorite assignments,” she wrote.
She asks students to respond to four questions about the reading and submit them in advance:
- What do you find most interesting about this text?
- How does it connect with other things we’ve read?
- What questions should we ask about it?
- How should we approach those questions? In particular, how could we use the text itself to begin to dig into your questions?
This strategy works for a few reasons. One is that only a few students are asked to do it in any given week, which makes the assignment manageable for her to review. (Linkon teaches two courses a semester but says this strategy worked when she had a heavier teaching load.) Another is that asking students in advance what they find interesting and what questions they have helps her shape the class discussion and makes it more student-centered.
Linkon has used variations of this strategy in a range of courses, including first-year courses and master’s-level seminars.
“Yes, some students will still copy from sources or get help from AI. I’m not sure anything I can do will stop that entirely,” she wrote. “But making this mostly about what they’re interested in seems to motivate a lot of them, and it helps them learn how to begin to approach a new text on their own. I get very positive feedback from students on this.”