Resources for Educators

Teaching Tip

From the Teacher’s Aide Newsletter

2016 July

Getting Students to Read

We are frequently complimented on the quality of our textbooks. Those compliments are often followed by: “If I could only get my students to do the reading assignments….” In the article, “Getting Horses to Drink: Three Ways to Promote Student Ownership of Reading Assignments,” (Sep 2015) Dr. Li-Shih Huang shares activities to help motivate students to do assigned readings. Here is an adaptation of the shared activities that I think could easily be applied to ethics and business classes.

Provide Choices to Promote Ownership of the Material

Have each student (or a small group of students) select from the list of required readings; they assume the role of classroom discussion facilitator at the appropriately scheduled time. The student facilitator asks the class to submit discussion questions ahead of time, to encourage consideration before the discussion period, and selects and discusses the best ones during the class period. To receive proper participation credit, each student would have to submit a thoughtful question or comment based on each reading, not a yes/no or true/false type of question.

Visit Dr. Huang’s entire article for more details and more ideas.