3 Ways to Actively Engage Learners

My name is Brandi Darnell, and I teach at Northern Elementary School in Pendleton County, Kentucky.  I have taught fourth grade at Northern for four years and will be teaching fifth grade math and social studies next year.  I am very excited about the move and the challenge of the change! 

I believe it is very important to actively engage and involve students in their learning.  I am constantly looking for new ideas about how to get students out of their seats and actively participating in class.  Some strategies that I have used in the past are:

• Four Corners--Students respond to a multiple choice question by going to the corner of the classroom that represents their answer choice.  (Corners are labeled A, B, C, and D.) This is a great way to get students up and is a terrific, quick formative assessment tool.  I take this a step further by choosing a student in each corner to verbally justify their answer choice.  This makes students accountable for their choice; they are less likely to just follow the crowd.
• Line Up!--Students are called to line up using content information, generally math content.  All of the students in my room are assigned classroom numbers.  I may call for all prime numbers to line up; if a student's classroom number is a prime number, he or she may line up.  Other variations of this include multiples and factors.  It's a great way to review these concepts which can be tricky for students.
• Walking in Their Shoes--I've done a variation of this activity to teach point of view.  Pairs of students are given an inanimate classroom object such as a stapler or marker.  One member of the pair must write a story about the object from a third person point of view, the other student must write a story from the first person point of view of the object.  The students love sharing their fun stories, and they gain a terrific grasp of the content!

My text for this semester is 40 Active Learning Strategies for the Inclusive Classroom.

Green, L. S., & Casale-Giannola, D. (2011) 40 active learning strategies for the inclusive classroom.  Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin.