Teaching Thought #115

Teacherscribe's Teaching Thought #115

Give your class back to your students.  Way #1 – Put their menu in their hands and let them decide what’s on it.

This is an interesting way of letting kids have input on the flow and structure of the lesson.

From the article - I used to write the order of my lessons on the whiteboard everyday before class started. I definitely didn’t do it as creatively as this guy. The kids didn’t tend to read it unless I read it to them, and it wasted a good portion of my whiteboard space.

Instead of doing that now, I use padlet to write up my lessons. I put it in “stream” format and part of our morning meeting consists of students looking at the schedules on their iPads. I’ve made a conscious effort to democratize the process so that students have a say in the order, or even the activity, that we are going to do during each class period. Padlet makes it easy to do so in that it allows you to add contributors. Just so that I don’t have too many fingers on their class schedule, I give this role out as one of my class jobs.