Waking up the Back Row: Using Effective Communicating-to-Learn Strategies in Education Courses

How can university faculty use communicating-to-learn activities to enliven discussions, check understanding, and assess learning? By incorporating various reading, writing, listening, speaking, and thinking strategies into their classes, faculty are teaching through example and are making classes invigorating. As such, their undergraduate and graduate elementary and secondary students can use similar techniques in their preK-12 classes. Along with providing detailed descriptions of creative activities, this article examines the research and includes additional resources, such as university websites with descriptions of writing-to-learn suggestions.