Interactive Lessons in 2 Easy Steps

1. Join in

In most traditional classrooms, the teacher is usually the one speaking and using the academic language the most. Leading to passive students.

Instead, as the teacher, be the facilitator!

With high frequency, have students say key terms and vocabulary with you or use repeat after me. Getting students to use key terms helps them practice and increases their memory for concepts. It also decreases the burden on the teacher to keep a lesson going by getting students vested in actively speaking.

Oxygenate their brains by getting students to come up with hand gestures or movements to go along with the key terms they're saying. It gets the fidgets out in a productive way. It's a great pathway to more efficient learning.

This simple step leads to students actively learning!

2. Share the workload

Teachers are hard workers and take the weight of the world on their shoulders. We're giving you permission to share the wealth (aka wealth of knowledge) with your students.

Every few minutes (at least 2 per 10 minutes typically) provide students a chance to turn and talk to a neighbor. This can be a prompted discussion using sentence stems and frames. To increase the rigor, ask high level Depth of Knowledge (DOK) questions before a peer led discussion in small groups. Then, each group can have a reporter to share out their conclusions.

Want more ideas? Discover more easy to use strategies

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