Teaching Thought #110

Teacherscribe's Teaching Thought #110

Use the 15 word gauntlet

I’m stealing this hack from James Alan Sturtevant, a high school history teacher.  Here is his website where he posts his work and thoughts on teaching.

Kelsey Johnson strongly recommended this when I stopped by the media center to grab some summer readings from our professional development library. 

Hacking Engagement Again: 50 Teacher Tools That Will Make Students Love Your Class.

Hack 54 - Lay Down the 15-Word Gauntlet -- This one works for both teachers and students.

The problem is that most presentations are boring.  And that is one of the things the kids I surveyed on the choir trip mentioned again and again and again: NO boring slideshows.  Put in a video.  Don't just cram a ton of text on a slide, or worse, don't just use the pre-fabricated slideshows the curriculum gives you.  This totally disengages kids.

Why?

This is what they had to say - the know the teacher didn't do the work.  They can even tell how most of the time the teacher isn't all that familiar with the slides (because they didn't create them or even preview them much).  To the students' eyes, this is no different than when they copy and paste most of their research into a paper.

The objectives are the same - to really do as little work as possible.

So instead, limit yourself to just 15 words per slide.

This works great too for student presentations.

You could take this one step further and present (or have your students present) a Pecha Kucha presentation (where you use no words at all on your slides.  Moreover, you have a set number of slides and you are only allowed a certain amount of time per each slide).