Staff showcasing-100minute engagement plan. #28days Day9

This year my school has introduced 100 minute lessons. Keeping students engaged for this amount of time is not easy, so today after school we were privileged to visit a few staff members show-casing their tools on keeping students engaged for 100 minutes.

There were several sessions to choose from, but we only had enough time to attend three 10 minute slot each.

Some of the strategies shared by our Head of English Susan included: evoking emotions with mind maps and artefacts, brainstorming or quizzes (a little bit of competition), dividing questions up to groups and certain individuals in groups so in essence peers teach peers, but each student has a responsibility and needs to be responsible for their own question. Puppets or posters for the learners who like to visualise, let them use these props to explain parts of the text. Get the students to dramatise parts of the text, this could be done by acting out parts, pretending to d a TV segment etc. And of course technology, use it well and both you and the students benefit.

The next session I attended was that of our Head of Middle School, Robyn. Her list of 10 compliments of http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-student-participation-tips She walked us through some of these ideas including mind warm-ups, using movement, co-operative learning structures, Quickwrites, undivided attention, fairness cup (I think I am going to try this one - I have some chatty students but all only the same ones raise their hands to answer questions), teamwork, again the use of technology and mixing up your teaching style to keep them interested and engaged.

My final visit was to the music teacher Ian who did a session on Maths and Music. There were so many choices, but this one intrigued me and and it certainly was fun clapping and keeping a beat. It required a bit of co-ordination, but counting helped me stay in rhythm (mostly) and by doing, participating in a group and having to concentrate on my beats, that I can see that this would get the students attention first before they have to do some theory work.

So what is my '100 minute engagement plan'? Shake it up, get them moving a bit, change activities often and include some fun and crazies as energisers. I might do some thumb wars halfway through my history lesson tomorrow to get the energy flowing. I will use a term that my daughter and I say 'I've got our crazies on,' I think I might have to get my crazies on for more fun and engaged learners...now just to get them to laugh at my jokes ;)

It certainly is a privilege to be part of a team where we can learn from one another, we can create ideas, implement new ideas and all this learnt from our very own staff. As a 'kind of' new staff member I feel that these opportunities offer so much value. I can ask more questions, adopt new approaches and add more skills to my teaching. I can try things I haven't tried before more confidently because others have and can offer me advice. I certainly am learning heaps and feel inspired by being part of this team, I just wish I could've attended more and seen more of what other staff members are doing.