Welcome to edutips, a side project of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast where I share one quick idea to make your teaching better.

This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host. Edutip 27 is sponsored by Class Composer.

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transform your student placement process. Today's edutip is get more participation with icons.

Suppose you're doing some kind of activity that requires a few students to volunteer for something. Maybe it's a discussion and you want to hear

ideas from a handful of people or you're running a workshop and need a few participants for some

kind of demonstration. In short, you need volunteers, but you're

not sure if enough people will raise their hands, and anyway, you'd like participation

to be more evenly distributed across the room, not limited to just a few extroverted people.

I got this idea years ago from a teacher named Ruth Wickham. Here's what she did to get more

participation from students in a language workshop that had 132 students attending. She downloaded

a set of 33 icons, which would be very easy to do from a site like the noun project. And she printed out four

copies of each icon. She just used clip art of things like a house, an aunt, a cow, a duck,

and so on. So she cut out the icons and taped each one inside one of the workbooks students would

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