When pupils work together they hone their creativity and critical thinking skills to help each other make sense of new material. It increases self-confidence as they discover they’re capable of mastering difficult concepts without help. Strategies to facilitate this: 1) Live question board – Using padlet pupils post their questions on and the teacher responds …
The teacher poses a question for pupils to consider independently. They write their response on a post it note and collate these on the board. Pupils then collect a couple, and discuss, respond, agree or disagree with their peer comments. Post it storm
A resource designed to allocate pupils clear roles within group activities to ensure all participate and furthermore develop their oracy/communication skills at the same time. Roles
Another partner talk strategy using visuals and sentence starters to promote structured dialogue between pupils. Talk tasks
A partner talk strategy where pupils enter into a structured dialogue about their learning prompted by sentence starters. Great idea to encourage pupils to debate or evaluate something. Talking point
At the start of the lesson, give pupils three ‘items’ to look for in and around the classroom. (the subtler the better) Ask them at the end of the lesson to identify how they were relevant to their learning today.
Display a picture or word related to the focus of the lesson and get pupils to ask as many questions as they can on that particular topic. Identify a ‘thread’ amongst the questions and set ‘live learning objectives.’ Pupils work together to then spend the lesson finding answers to their queries.
Ask students to create a revision resource to share with their classmates but they ‘cross it over’ or ‘mix it up’ with a topic that interests them. E.g. Mr Men meets punctuation, punctuation meets Disney princesses.
A challenging starter that requires pupils to group 4 terms and justify their connection to one another in a race against time! Use this website to create an electronic game version: https://www.classtools.net/connect/ Only connect
Expose students to quotes, texts, concepts or definitions at the start of the lesson before any teacher input. Blindstarter