So, I avoid that teaching method whenever I can and I always try to keep my students engaged.
I am a Grade 9 advisory teacher along with two others, so we have to collaborate. And again, I did not want to lecture or sit through one. I have seen some teachers, and I have also at one point in time, read out the technology agreements to the students. But that never sticks. And I wanted this to stick.
So I pulled out a trick I learned from Jeff Utech. I had them brainstorm ideas for what we should include in our essential agreements. Their advisor teacher from last year told me they spent too much time on them.
I didn't want a repeat of that.
From there, they then got with a partner, randomly chosen for them, and put their ideas together into these groups.
The last time I did something like this, I wrote the whole list out on the board. This time I pasted this list into Google Sheets and showed them the UNIQUE function. (I want to show them the power of a spreadsheet.) This gave us a list with no duplicates.
The next step was for them to make categories of ideas. Looking at the shared spreadsheet of the unique topics, as pair groups, they think of topics that will act as umbrella categories. We came up with the following:
- Respect
- Responsible
- Mindful
- Cooperation
- Learning
- Environment
We only had a few minutes left, otherwise I would have asked them to create sentences for the list we made. So I made these sentences:
Be Respectful
Help make a positive learning environment
Cooperate with others
Be Mindful of others
Be Responsible
I guess these are not sentences.
We did a lot of work in a short period to get these together.
This is how I want all my classes to run.