Three Unbelievably Simple Strategies You Can Use Today In Your Classroom To Engage And Motivate Your Students
Three Unbelievably Simple Strategies You Can Use Today In Your Classroom To Engage And Motivate Your Students
The focus of March’s Red Thread is starters and plenaries. Much like any good sandwich where a top and bottom layer hold together the filling, any good lesson has a strong beginning, middle and end.
When these beginnings (starters) and endings (plenaries) are well planned and resourced, they can activate prior knowledge which can help with retrieval practice but these low stakes tasks can also inject an element of fun and gamification which can help build relationships in the classroom. This helps teachers to create psychologically safe spaces in which their students can collaborate, communicate, think and thrive.
What I am going to share with you in this edition is a range of simple, editable templates and ideas that you can use in your class or share with your team to achieve this.
These templates and ideas can be used either as starter tasks or plenaries. Each is shown with a worked example.
Clicking on the link to the editable template will allow you to follow the steps to create your own that meets your teaching and learning context.
You will need a Canva account to edit the templates, but if you prefer to access them as editable PowerPoint presentations, please contact me via this link with your request
These resources make up just a tiny fraction of the online Teaching for Learning professional development content that I will release in April on Teachable.
This video course will focus on research and experience-informed teaching models along with a wide range of generic learning activities and templates that any teacher can use to promote creative and critical thinking, collaboration and communication in their classrooms.
If you want to stay informed about the release date, follow me on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected]
Idea #1: Reordering the sentences. Find the editable template here.
Idea #2: Categorising. Find the editable template here
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Idea #3: Odd one out. Find the editable template here
Building up a bank of editable templates can speed up the content creation process for busy teachers. Templates like this can be used for so much more than something to fill the last few minutes of a lesson or to settle a class at the beginning of a lesson:
These formative assessment tasks help to hone thinking skills, teamwork, activate long term memory, use working memory, build confidence, and promote interleaved practice.
These tasks also assist the teacher in identifying misconceptions among one or many students which can then inform the next steps in their instruction.
If you found value in this post or think that someone else would, please like, comment and share.
I publish The Red Thread on a monthly basis and chose this name because my work connects learning and teaching practices. I believe that effective teaching lays the foundations for learning mastery.
For many people across the world, the symbol of a red thread represents support, safety, security and a sense that they are not alone, especially while facing adversity.
Educators need a red thread now more than ever.
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