Last year, I typed these strategies up for the school. Most of them we all learned in college, but some are easy to forget. For all the new teachers out there, here's one more resource!
1. Engagement: Questioning & Movement
a. Time: When you ask a question, don’t forget to give the kids some wait time before you call on a student—some need a few more seconds to process, and rapid fire won’t always work. 5 seconds feels like forever for us, but really helps them.
b. Sometimes re-prompting will help—if the same few kids are always eager to answer, restate the question in another way to get more kids involved, or to lead them to a smaller piece of the puzzle before building back up to the big question.
c. Don’t forget to call on the kids who don’t answer or never raise their hands.
d. Pepper this in! Tell a student that he or she will be answering the following question, pause, give the question, and give the student a bit of time to think, then answer.
e. Hold other students accountable when they’re not answering by calling on them to REPEAT what the last student said. You shouldn’t have to repeat what the student says!
f. Echo back like they do in the elementary grades.
g. Throw a Koosh-ball, or one of those inflatable cubes and don’t let the kids leave until everyone’s participated.
h. Post answers around the room and have the kids write the questions, or give them the questions and have them use the posted answers as a scavenger hunt. This works well introducing or reviewing a unit.
i. Have the kids move around as much as possible. Use carousel, four corners, or jigsaw techniques to have them go to different stations. Have students play charades or act out scenarios to answer your question.
j. Pull sticks or do some sort of random call so they know that each one will be accountable at some time during the lesson.
k. Try to steer clear of “yes/no” questions, or questions with really obvious answers—sometimes they’ll just tell you what they think you want to hear. If I ask one of these questions and they respond too quickly, I give them a disturbed look like “really?”….even if they’re right. I make them think about it again, talk with a neighbor, and this time, give me a complete sentence with justification. This helps! (Because let’s face it… we can’t always ask amazing questions off the top of their heads AND its fun to mess with them a little!)
l. Play games! Fuentes’s Hot Seat game is great for vocab. (E-mail me if you want more on that)
2. Engagement: Look Who’s Talking?
a. The people talking are the people that are learning. Don’t go longer than 2-3 minutes without having some sort of interaction with the kids—questioning counts!
b. Use a timer to stop your lectures! If your PowerPoint/presentation is interactive, try not to make the teacher led time longer than 8 minutes without giving them a significant break to work with the material.
c. Don’t forget to give the kids process time when lecturing—they may get it as you’re going but they’ll quickly forget if they don’t DO something with it. Let them explain to a neighbor, summarize it, get clarification, etc. before you continue on.
d. Ask basic questions, but also try to ask questions that don’t have yes or no answers. Kids will be more courageous, and will use their imaginations more to answer. Yay for higher participation.
3. Motivation & Connections
a. Try to get to know the kids as much as you can. The more you know them, the more you’ll gain mutual respect and will be able to cater to them and their interests. Doing lots of centers and group work makes this easy—as you rotate around, you build better rapport.
b. Remember that their world isn’t the one we grew up in. Even having story problems written about them helps.
c. If you can’t explain to them why they’re learning something, or why it’s important, it’ll be hard for them to care. Be prepared to answer the question “What’s in it for me?”
4. Background & Common Ground
a. Good teachers use an “attention getter” (also known in obnoxious teacher jargon as an “anticipatory set.”) to get the kids excited about the lesson and to turn their brains on. If you’re not a melodramatic type and don’t like the idea, try thinking of it as a shared experience—it doesn’t necessarily have to be something crazy-exciting. Do something together that serves as an analogy for the concept, then link it to the academic idea. (See attached notebook presentation as an example—the teacher page is at the end)
b. Give the kids a chart, a book, or something else to look at and have them write observations, predictions, and then any questions they still have. Then share with a partner. After they’ve already familiarized themselves, dig in!
c. Don’t tell them the answers! Plan lessons that let them observe and predict/hypothesize/infer and don’t them depend on you. Every time they question you, fire a question back; lead them off to a wrong direction, or to another idea. Let them finish a sort/categorization (and give their reasoning for why they put together what they did) and have incorrect answers. Then, get another classmate from another class write them a letter and give their own ideas—what’s incorrect and why; what their grade would be and why. This fosters more independence and creativity on their part, plus you can incorporate debate/discussion, reading and writing!
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