By Phil Zellers
As I begin to prepare for each new
school year, I think about ways to create a classroom where students want to be.
We all want our classrooms to be a place where students feel comfortable
to share ideas, ask questions, and be creative.
I have begun to realize how important it is to build relationships early
in the year. So, the last couple of years I have spent time at the beginning of
the year getting students comfortable with one another and with me.
Throughout the year, we continue to develop this culture. At the beginning of each new project, students are assigned new groups and we complete some type of team building activity. The activity can be tied to the content (but doesn’t always have to be) you will be teaching and can be used as a way to spark interest in the new project. Here are some quick activities (with tech variations), some conducted before, during, or after completing a project, to help build a positive classroom culture:
1. Have students create an “All About Me” page to
share with the class or with their group. Tech variation: Use
Google Presentations and let each student add their own slide to the
presentation.
2. Speed Mixer: Students find partners and chat
with each other for 2 minutes about a particular, content related topic,
after two minutes they switch partners.
This could also be used for a test review. Tech variation: Present your
topic or question to the students and let them chat in TodaysMeet for 2
minutes. Then, present a different
question and repeat.
3. Idea Sprint: Divide students into groups. Give them a topic or question. They will have 30 seconds to brainstorm
and list as many ideas as they can without talking. The group with the most or best ideas
wins. Tech variation: Have each group use a Google doc that they
share with each other so they can see each other’s ideas on the same
document. You could also create a
class Google Doc shared with everyone and let the whole class work on it
at the same time.
4. Critical Friends: Students critically analyze
each other’s project or papers (much like a peer review). In the critical friends activity,
students complete “I like…” and “I wonder…” statements about the projects
or papers they are reviewing. Tech
variation: If the project or paper is something that can be uploaded
to Google Docs, students can give other students the rights to make
comments on it to complete the “I like…” and “I wonder…” statements
highlighting particular parts of the documents.
5. Reflection Discussions: Students reflect on
what they learned in a project or unit, how well their group worked
together, and the structure of the project itself. Tech variation: Let the students
conduct the discussion via the “Discussions” feature in My Big
Campus. They can post their own answers
and then look through the other answers to make additional comments.
These are just a few activities
that can be used and won’t take too much time.
It’s all about building relationships and creating an environment of respect,
inquiry, and creativity.
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