Activities to Engage Students in With the Syllabus

Every teacher has a different syllabus. There are so many ways one can create a syllabus: an infographic, a traditional document, using Bitmojis, and even creating graphs. It doesn’t’ matter what your syllabus looks like, what is important is what is inside it. The content within your syllabus is what you want students to read through and understand so they can be successful in the course.

So what can teachers do to ensure students actually read through the document that you have spent so much time on? Let me share with you a few ideas you can use in your classroom during the first week of school to discuss your syllabus and encourage students to engage with your document. Here are five of my favorites. You can select one or more of the activities to use with your students.

Syllabus Scavenger Hunt

A syllabus scavenger hunt is my favorite way of getting students to engage and interact with the syllabus. It is a fun activity that incorporates think, pair, share interaction. A scavenger hunt is easy to set up and is much more engaging that just reading through the document.

Create a list of questions of the important bits of information you want students to know. Your big ideas might be cell phone policy, late work policy, how to contact you, grading, etc. Create questions in a randomized order that will help students be able to go through the syllabus together and answer questions. After students are finished, the teacher can conduct a group discussion to clarify, explain, and answer any questions students might have.

You can even give the winning team a free homework pass or free point on the first quiz (really 1 point will not change a grade but kids love this). This will set the tone for positivity for the school year.

Syllabus Icebreaker

You can make exploring the syllabus into an icebreaker activity. For example, you can assign students to become an expert on one portion of the syllabus, then ask them to move through the room, introducing themselves to one another and learning about the syllabus from their classmates. Afterward, give prizes to whoever remembers the most about the syllabus and the most names of classmates. We want students to get to know each other so this activity covers two important parts of the first week of school!

Open-Note Quiz

Give an open-notes syllabus quiz at the end of the first week of school. Add a little excitement to the test by adding one silly answer to each list of multiple-choice options. Make getting 100% on the quiz mandatory, but let kids take it as many times as they need in order to achieve that grade. Create the quiz on a Google Form or other platform that will self-grade to save you time.

Syllabus Stations

Chunk the syllabus into sections and create stations. Let students move through the different sections completing tasks at each station like answering questions, taking a quiz, making an infographic, or creating a video summarizing the information. Each station can have a different task in order to keep boredom at bay.

You can also set up stations for the syllabus as you would above but instead of different activities, students would have one question document to complete. Give students the option to travel in pairs, in small groups, or alone. Adding choice into the first activities of the school year.

Syllabus Escape Room

Create an escape room to gamify your syllabus. Create an escape room by blending a mix of new school ed-tech (Google Forms, Flipgrid, Remind, and Padlet) with old school pedagogies like collaborative learning and honest-to-goodness interaction, all of which are so critically important, especially in those first days of school. Set the students up in teams and let them try to be the first to unlock the clues of your syllabus.

Which activities will you try?

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