creative ways to have students summarize article

Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or Thatīasic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups. In Starr Sackstein’s high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.Įnjoy! Higher-Prep Discussion Strategies Gallery Walk >īasic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. For each strategy, you’ll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don’t really stand alone. The last group is the ongoing strategies. Note that these are not strict categories it’s certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active.

The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. I’ve separated the strategies into three groups. If you’ve struggled to find effective ways to develop students’ speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day. So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research. They didn’t know any other “formats.” I have only ever been familiar with a few myself.

The problem wasn’t them in most of the classrooms where they’d sat as students, that’s exactly what a class discussion looked like. When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase “We will discuss.”Įvery time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: “What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?” I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking He would throw out a couple of questions like “So what did you think about the video?” or “What was the theme of the story?” and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

Creative ways to have students summarize article