We held a micro TeachMeet yesterday at Malvern College Switzerland. Of all the things you can do on a staff training day, I find these the most valuable.
Here's what I learnt:- PetchaKutcha is a way of organising a presentation that restricts you to twenty slides on which you spend a maximum of 20 seconds. Excellent for teachers and a useful scaffold for pupil presentations.
- Whiteboard.fi is a useful digital alternative to physical whiteboards. Great for AfL.
- Seneca learning is a great little tool for revision and homework. There seem to be tests on just about everything including A-level Economics :-)
- Teacher introduction by numbers. Try putting up some numbers about yourself arranged on the board similar to this as a springboard to introducing yourself to a new class. Ask them what they think the numbers represent and watch the discussion unfold:
Answers: 2 children; 20, 21 ages of children; 1989 year of teacher training; 27 years in Switzerland; 10,887 money raised in recent charity event; 4, 5 number of house moves/cars.
- Noughts and crosses. A good end-of-lesson exercise. Put a noughts and crosses grid up on the board. Add keywords words to each box. The game is played by asking teams to define the keywords in order to place their o or x.
- Diana Laurillard has devised a 'learning designer' found here. It can be used to put together a scheme of work and then assess to what extent the course is balanced and varied with a pie chart like this:
- The book 'When Adults Change, Everything Changes' looks worth a read.
- Do Now Activities, as recommended by Doug Lemov are a great way to start a lesson. This is especially true if they involve revisiting materials from earlier in the course to reinforce the learning. Here's one I tried today for A-level History:
- Silent demonstrations can be a useful way of hooking children in.