Over September and October I will be publishing weekly articles on effective teaching strategies for trainee teachers and NQTs, offering brief (and, I hope, useful and practical!) examples of lessons, ideas, and resources that saved my bacon on more than one occasion!
Other articles in this series:
- Teacher Training: Five things I wish I’d known…
- Quick and effective lesson ideas #2 – The Research Review
- Quick and effective lesson ideas #3 – The Recall Challenge
- Quick and Effective Lesson Ideas #4 – Take a student-focused approach to improve your marking efficiency
- Quick and Effective Lesson Ideas #5 – “The Big Yellow Box” (Or, How to make your students work harder than you!)
- Quick and Effective Lesson Ideas #6 – Four fun ways to demonstrate student progress!
This is one of my favourite variations of what Alex Quigley, writer of The Confident Teacher, calls “Post it note pedagogy”. The mileage of this task depends very much on the subject and the topic; while it may not be appropriate for everything on the curriculum, it works a treat when revising concepts that provoke discussion!
I sell this to my students (with tongue ever-so- slightly in cheek) as “the educational party game where everyone’s a winner!” Once the chorus of groans subsides, this activity consistently results in exciting ad-hoc educational opportunities, encourages top-notch student responses, and offers the potential for student-led collaborative learning. It’s also a good way of finding out what “banging choons” the kids are into this week…
- Revision of large or detailed topics (I found it really useful with poems)
- Knowledge consolidation / plenaries
- Linking ideas and topics
- Building to homework / leading into a starter activity next lesson
Preparation time: 10mins approx.
Activity Length: 15mins, and leads into an assessment task or a homework that you can tailor depending on your requirements.
- 1 x small cardboard box with a lid – mine was once home to 80 bags of Yorkshire Tea, which felt like the ideal size. (In a pinch, 1 large envelope will do!) Decorate it. Make it your own. Keep it on your desk where the students can all see it.
- Post-it notes (enough for a class)
- Music! (If your classroom has internet access, YouTube will be your friend here. If not, music played through a phone will do the job just fine. If you’re letting students choose the tune, make sure that you specify “radio edits only, please”)
- Spare pens (just in case)
This activity involves either a teacher or students breaking down a learning topic into component pieces on post-it notes, putting these notes into a box (or envelope) and passing the ideas around to music.
Whenever the teacher stops the music, whoever is in possession of the box pulls out a note and reads it aloud. The rest of the class then have 30 seconds discussion time to respond to the note in some way, per the teacher’s directions, before the person with the note chooses classmates to share their ideas. Once the topic has been discussed to a satisfactory degree, the music starts up again…!
Once students are comfortable with the concept, the challenge can be increased by drawing multiple post-it notes (i.e. the box makes a couple of stops), then using the discussion period to reflect on links between the ideas that have been drawn.
Here’s how the activity might look if, for example, I was concluding a lesson in which the students had studied a poem…
- Prior to the lesson, I write line numbers on post-it notes that represent small sections of the poem (e.g. 1-2; 3; 5-7 etc). These notes are folded and put in the box. I also throw in some notes containing multiples of other relevant ideas and terms: “Imagery”; “The theme of Solitude”; “Historical Context” and so on and so forth.
- During the lesson, the class read the poem and learn about its various features.
- I pull out the box. “It’s time to see how much we’ve learned!” (Good opportunity for fun here – when teaching A Doll’s House, I named the box “Nora the Explorer”; when teaching Blake, it became “Pass the Pastoral”). Students roll their 