Teaching Activities to Use in a Pinch

Activities to use in a pinch

Not every school day goes well—students learning and the teacher enjoying herself. Some days have been and will be quite challenging. I’ve been threatened and laughed at by students, splattered by water balloons, chewed out by parents, and criticized by administrators. Even during these difficult and frustrating times, I found balance with a satisfying teaching moment or successful lesson. Typically, I would engage in a few of my (students’) favorite things.

• An informal assessment with “baseball”—I pick the kids and they pick the difficulty of the assessment question—a single, double, triple, or homerun. I run them around the class if they answer the question successfully.
• With dramatic passion, partaking in a read aloud of a passage of primary source text.
• A performance of a skit, created myself or purchased, on a historical topic.
• The bubble: three or four students discuss a difficult subject while the rest of the class watches.
• Students pairing-up to discuss or review a concept followed by a demanding Socratic seminar.
• Illustrating a concept with a cartoon, earning extra credit if the work is funny.
• Asking students to write a short (three-paragraph) story with the six vocabulary words we just learned
• Providing feedback on whether a concept was learned through students self-reporting, using a Likert (one to five) scale.
• Psychological demonstrations and experiments on memory, reinforcement and punishment, and perception.
• Assigning poster presentations or PowerPoint presentations on controversial history and economics topics and biographical anecdotes.
• Analyzing primary source documents such as political cartoons, photographs, short speeches, and editorials placed around the room.
• Bringing in technology—making a video commercial of a concept, “publishing” a biography in Facebook format, and doing web searches.

Some of these activities are teacher-centered and some are student-centered. They all engage both student and teacher and usually succeed. Teachers may compose these activities themselves, copy and adopt colleagues’ activities, discover and implement lesson plans from trade magazines such as Social Education and American Educator, find lessons on various internet sites, buy lessons from publishers, and create lessons through a summer group devoted to that purpose such as Teaching American History (TAH).

Too many teachers mindlessly use the textbook as their main teaching tool. I find three problems with this. First, the state standards and your department’s agreement on which ones are most critical and not the pages of the textbook should determine your curriculum. Second, many textbooks include topics that are not part of the state standards and do not include enough material on standards that may be more important. Third, students with poor literacy skills and those unable to steadily concentrate have trouble reading a dense textbook.

How I Will Change My Teaching of a Low-Level History Class

Bloom's Taxonomy

Sophomore World History is a challenging class to teach at my high school. The best students are diverted into our AP program, leaving me three or four classes filled with many uninterested and unmotivated kids that have a history of behavioral problems. I taught four sections of these kids last year. Here are the harsh realities I observed working with this struggling population:

• Half the students will do homework some of the time.
• About one third will not complete ANY homework on time for the entire year.
• Half the students hate reading and do not understand what they read
• Half will take notes only if forced. Next to none will use notes to prepare for a test. (They prefer using the textbook, amazingly.)
• The students are unwilling to do true group work. One student in the group would do the work and the rest would watch or be off task.
• Activities such as skits and reenactments are only partially effective, because so many of the kids have too little background knowledge to understand the relevance of the activity.

I do convince a few students that history is interesting. I do help some students to enjoy reading, and I do get some students to take notes more effectively. However, too many students in these classes were not fully engaged by my methods last year. So I plan to do a few things differently.

• I will assign fewer readings as homework. We will do almost all reading in the classroom.
• Most lectures will be read-alouds of the textbook. Only after that will students be assigned an in-class reading of the same material.
• I used a variation of Cornell notes last year. Few students benefited. This year we will learn by presenting the material and going over it with frequent informal formative assessments such as fast-paced in-class questions ("peppering").
• I plan more summative assessments that include writing--short essay questions that ask for items high on Bloom's Taxonomy such as evaluating why one leader was better than another. These questions will be complex, so no two answers should be alike.

I hope these changes result in greater student engagement and achievement.

Postscript: January 7, 2012:  These changes have produced better though not radically improved grades. Additionally, I will examine the results of standardized testing, available in August.2013.