In his freshman seminar "What is College and What is it For?," Dr. Paul Barreira uses an icebreaker that lets students know that there are no right answers and that students should feel comfortable sharing their experiences.  

In this midterm review activity, students practice answering multiple choice questions on a wide variety of topics by working in pairs to answer review questions for the midterm.

In this activity, students appropriate and manipulate the words, grammar and themes of a “classic” work in order to develop their own styles as creative writers. By turning an iconic medium into a popular genre, students learn that classic writers have done the same thing, borrowing and stealing other people’s words.  

In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin have their students watch a commercial for a major Swedish food chain on YouTube in order to practice helping verbs and adjectives while working on listening comprehension and being exposed to Swedish television. 

In the revision stage of their the paper, Jerusha Achterberg uses vegetables to teach students how to structure their papers so that the organization coordinates with the thesis.  The idea behind this activity is to break the 5 paragraph mold students bring from high school. 

In her Expos section, Jerusha Achterberg teaches how to clearly describe the methods the will be used in a subsequent paper.  This activity was motivated by the fact that students were having trouble writing the methods section in their final paper proposals.

In this activity, Jerusha Achterberg has her students work in groups to develop persuasive arguments.

In this activity, Jerusha Acterberg has students respond to a scenario where somebody is making a scientific assertion and then use the information from the readings to evaluate that assertion.

Students compare chronologies of different historians of the French Revolution to understand how it has been interpreted and understood by generations of scholars. 

In SLS 12, Erin Blevins engages her students by bringing in actual fish in order to start a discussion of adaptation and evolution.  

After reading all the novels, students split into groups and "pitch" their favorite novel to the instructor who plays the role of a publisher. 

Students work in groups to answer problem set questions in section and then discuss the answers with the class.

Students suggest possible structures for a molecule and the vote on which ones are correct. Then, two or three students can be selected to calculate the structure on the chalkboard, while the rest of the students do so with paper and pencil. They walk through the formal calculations and compare their answers to the results of the voting at the beginning of the class.

In this activity students work together in groups or as individuals on computers to understand how we can use photometric observations of stars to discover exoplanets.