A bit about plenaries...

One of my Performance Management targets over the past academic year has been to focus on developing effective plenaries. I think (although it was a long time ago now, returning to work in post-baby fug!) that I chose it intending on trying out a broader range, as I had previously got a bit stuck in a rut. I must admit that for a lot of the year I wasn't really concentrating on them, more on keeping my head above water and adjusting to being a (albeit part-time) working mum of 2.

And now of course I have my review coming up, and being queen-of-the-last-minute, I thought it might be a good idea to write down a few thoughts... and it'll look impressive and all reflective ;)

Anyway, I did some good ones, and some 'oh bother, we only have 3 mins before the bell, tell your partner 3 things you have learned today' type ones. Some of my favourites were:

Shrink-me/grow-me: Students have to say what non-essential elements can be taken out of a sentence, and then put in new ones to make it as whizzy as possible (whizzy: there is a whole new post in that!).

Same or different?: Put up groups or pairs of words, and students have to say in what ways they are the same and in what ways they are different, this could be meaning or grammatical points. E.g.

Connect 4: put 16 words from the lesson on the board, students have to put them into 4 groups of 4 words chosen by them (could be done by you but I like them to think more!). They must be able to explain their categories e.g. these four are all feminine. A variation on this is to give the students groups of vocab and they have to say what the category is, e.g. adverbs/past participles.

Set your own homework: Pairs or groups come up with what they think would be the most useful homework to consolidate their learning. They can either do their own, or we sometimes vote and all do the same thing. (I should mention I only had a KS5 class last year, not tried this with littlies...yet!)

What's that word?: put up definitions or similes of words from the lesson and students have to work out what they are.

What would they say?: Put up a provocative/inspiring image and students have to suggest what the people might be saying e.g.

 

Hmm, I really do love that ppt design! Time to master Prezi...

Anyway, while I was going through old stuff and digging these out, I got thinking (dangerous...!). These are all great, they involve some HOTS, they aren't just repeating bits of the lesson, they involve collaboration and reflection. But in the post a week or so ago I got a postcard I sent to myself from a TEEP course in July. It said:

METACOGNITION IS KEY: FOCUS ON THE HOW NOT THE WHAT. TEACH STUDENTS HOW TO LEARN! (All in caps, I must have wanted myself to take note!)

Bit of background in case anyone does ever read this: I did an MSc in Applied Linguistics & Second Language Acquisition and focused on learner strategies for my dissertation, it has always been super important to me not just to spoon feed. 

So one of my new aims (although maybe not a Perf. Man. one!) this year is going to be to try and focus more on this during plenaries, not every time but periodically. How did you work today? How did you learn those words? How did you work out what that meant? How did you adapt that example? How did you get to that answer? How did you feel when doing x/y/z? What could you have done differently? What were you thinking? I will be interested to see if it makes any difference!