Associate Professor Cheng-Yun (CY) Tsang transformed law seminars in undergraduate law and Juris Doctor program with his innovative “colourful sticky notes” approach, where each student’s contribution is acknowledged with a coloured note. This simple practice provides immediate feedback, tracks participation fairly, and lowers anxiety. Guided by a belief that legal education should produce both creators and practitioners, he designs learning experiences that link doctrine with policy, fostering confidence, collaboration, and a genuine sense of inclusion.
There are two main reasons that motivated me to come up with the “colourful sticky note” approach:
The first reason was that I want to help my students to deliver and develop their own analytical framework to navigate technological evolution, societal changes, geopolitical uncertainty, and legal and regulatory complexity. Therefore, I want my students to have that kind of policy oriented, interdisciplinary thinking. To achieve that I think it's essential to equip our students with the ability to engage themselves with multiple stakeholder dialogues.
My second reason was that based on my conversation with a few students, I understood that students are actually longing for in-person engagement and interactions. They are looking for an engaging and inspiring environment, but the problem is we don't necessarily provide students with that opportunity. So I wanted to engage the students and I want my students to come up in the classroom and exchange ideas with one another.
In collaboration with my wife, who used to be a children's musical theatre director and a kindergarten manager, we were discussing how I could make my classroom respectful and engaging. That's why we end up creating the “colourful sticky note” approach.
The colourful sticky notes method encourages fair class participation, encouraging students to speak up and also provides an incentive for students to show up in the classroom.
I prepared four different colours of sticky notes. Whenever a student would raise their hand and speak up in the class, based on the student's quality of speech I would give them a sticky note. The more frequently they engaged with the classroom discussion, the more sticky notes they collected.
After each seminar, I ask whoever received sticky notes to write down their names and student ID on each independent note, and then return them to me after the seminar.
The beauty of this approach is that at first students don't realise what the colours stand for but as the class progresses, they sort of understand the frequency with which they I distribute a different colour and they realise, “oh, so purple probably suggests to a higher quality speech and yellow might suggest that you know it's reasonably well thought out”.
I do some background work, totalling points which will be taken into consideration in their class participation. I add up all the points one student's accumulated throughout the semester.
If I purely mark class participation based on the accumulation of sticky notes, that's unfair for some students. Even if I want every student to be able to present their ideas, thoughts and arguments in public and this in front of their fellow students, every time I raise a question, on average at least ten or so students raise their hands. So some students might have the urgency of speaking up, but they don't necessarily get the opportunity. I can't really count every student due to the time limit. So I use a range-based system.
I give a baseline mark for all students; the baseline is set at a Credit Score level if no unapproved absence was noted for that student. Then based on the points accumulation distribution, I generally create 4 or 5 different ranges (marks) to add to the Credit level default. For example, my class participation is 15% of the total final mark, so the baseline for every student is 9 marks. For students who accumulated more than 10 points, I may add 5 marks, so their total mark for class participation will be 14. If students who accumulated points between 8 to 9.9, then an extra 3 marks will be added, so these students will receive 13 marks for their class participation.
I constantly reflect upon my approach. Since I started using sticky notes, there are two areas that I’ve improved. I understand some students are a bit shy, just like myself, so they may feel a bit hesitant to raise their hand and speak up for other reasons. So how can I make that up?
This semester, I created an in-class collaborative Moodle forum for each seminar which is timed to close two hours after the seminar ends. I always encourage students to raise their hands, but they can also write their thoughts, their reactions, their responses using the collaborative forums.
I will read word by word whatever students have posted on the collaborative forum and I will take that into consideration of their class participation. I read the post and have an idea in my mind, for example, this post is equal to the yellow sticky note. I prepare spreadsheets for different things, one for the sticky notes students accumulated and another for the collaborative forum. So I spend some more time reading students' writing on the forum after each seminar and then record their points.
The colourful sticky notes method deals with individual students' performance. So what about collective student performance?
Based on my student’s feedback, I thought I could do something to facilitate group discussion as well.
In addition to colourful sticky notes, I created a system with novelty souvenir notes. Each souvenir note represents a certain dollar value and every time I ask the students to do 20 minutes of group discussion, I will ask each group to present their insights and maybe debate with other groups. Based on these speeches and presentations, I assign each group with a different note according to the quality of their discussion. Then all the group members will be marked accordingly based on the souvenir notes they were assigned.
So far the student feedback has been extremely positive, even better than I first anticipated. I was even shortlisted as one of the four Monash Student Association’s Teaching Award for Innovativation in 2024!
“CY was an excellent and generous lecturer who helped to promote an engaging atmosphere that allows students to comfortably participate in class discussion and there is a clear and motivating system for measuring class participation and to collect collaborative and conversational environment in lectures.”
“Attendance proved to be very helpful. I may not have contributed in class that much, but it was very helpful in hearing other students' contributions and the lecturer’s feedback to them. The seminars were hands down the most effective aspect of the unit.”
“I appreciated his ability to incorporate class discussion and empower students to put their input without feeling judged.”
“CY did a good job of fostering a culture of thoughtful and engaging class participation from a wide variety of students.”
This exemplar is easy to implement.
Recommended resources and training:
As university educators, we all face problems around class engagement.
Class participation marks are a strong driver, especially for law students, because they care very much about their marks, even if I encourage them not to. However, most units are recorded potentially undermining students' incentive to come to the classroom.
Students are looking for an engaging and inspiring environment, so providing them with some fun, engaging and respectful feedback can really be a strong driver for students to come to class and exchange ideas with one another.
Here are some additional resources that you can browse to help you implement this assessment.
