Middle and high school English teachers: one very easy and effective way to get your students to engage in their learning is by getting them up and moving. I'm sure you know from staff meetings and PD sessions that it can be hard to sit and listen for long periods of time. It's no different for our students, so if we can provide opportunities for them to move around, we will get more engagement. But how do we do this and keep them learning? Read on to discover 5 easy ways to add movement in your class - and to get a PDF that will help you with inspiration & planning!
👉🏻 If you want to read some research that supports the idea of moving to learn click here or here.
1. The Easiest Way to Add Movement: The Stand-and-Talk
One of my favorite ways to break things up. - and to give students a chance to stretch - is the stand-and-talk. It's exactly like the turn-and-talk, but students do it on their feet. You can use it any time during the class, but it works really well after students have been sitting and listening for a while.
Both of these strategies are also really effective for getting all students to think, as you do this in place of getting a handful of students to answer the questions you pose during class discussions. If you need more background on this, click here.
The stand-and-talk is a way to add movement in your class that is simple and takes zero prep. Simply pose a question, ask all students to think about how they would answer or brainstorm how they would respond. Then, ask them to stand and share with a partner. You may have to prod them to stand at first - they are used to sitting and can be hard to move off those seats - but once they get used to this strategy, they welcome the chance to stand and stretch.
2. Stand-Up-Stations & Vertical Learning Add Movement in Your Class
I am a huge fan of learning stations, as they provide a chance for students to focus on a topic/skill AND move during class. You can up the movement factor if you use stand-up stations with your students. Simply adhere the directions or questions on the wall, group your students, and send them off to complete each task that you assign.
Give each group a certain amount of time at each station, and then have them move clockwise as a group until they have visited each station. I tend not to give a designated time, but decide as I'm circulating and listening when it's time to move them on.
What do you put on the wall?
Anything that you might put on a worksheet - questions about a text, quotes for response, ideas for discussion, even grammar exercises - can be copied on a 11 x 17 piece of paper or written on chart paper. You will need to break up the tasks, so you can distribute them on approximately five areas; then instead of having students working on their assignment at their desks, they do the work on their feet.
Here are some ideas that you can use for stand-up-stations:
- Copy significant sections of a text (a different one for each poster) and ask students to work together to do a close read and to conclude the author's purpose
- Do the same with a poem
- Grammar exercises that they have to complete
- Topics you want students to discuss/debate
- A topic sentence that you want them support with ideas, images, etc.
The left hand picture above, shows the results of a discussion students had around pre-reading topics for a novel. Read more about it here.
The middle picture shows the prep work I did for a vertical writing exercise where students were learning about language choices and tone. I tell you all about it here.
And the right hand picture illustrates the discussion and conclusions students were making about the author's purpose in a section of the novel we were reading. More details on this post!
3. Get Students Moving in Class with a Gallery Walk
I especially like this strategy because I can use it to push students to fully develop an idea, something they often struggle with. If, for example a group made a point about a text or passage, a visiting group can add a new point to support - or even refute - it. If we are doing creative writing, I might ask each group to add a new sensory image to a description. They can write on the poster using a different color marker or sticky notes, as you can see below.
4. Get Students Moving with Quote Walks
Quote Walks are a special type of stand-up-stations.
Quite often, we English teachers like to give students significant passages from a class text to analyze. Instead of doing this via a worksheet, copy each quotation on a 11 x 14 or 11 x 17 page and place them in various places throughout the classroom. Then, instruct students to visit each one and respond to the prompt.
You can also ask them to choose two or three quotes that they want to respond to in order to give them some choice. Here's one I did with great success - that was super easy to assess too!
5. Use an Evidence Wall to Get Students Moving in Class
Several years ago, I was on a mission to get my students to choose better evidence (or even some evidence) to support their points. We were reading To Kill a Mockingbird and I decided to make Evidence Posters, using some of the themes and quotes from the novel.
The posters I made were put up throughout the classroom, and students were told to record quotations from the novel that they thought supported the idea on each poster.
During reading time, or after group discussions, they could get up and place the quotations they found with the appropriate theme/idea. We did periodic gallery walks for them to collect evidence, and when we were done, I assigned groups one of the topics and they did presentations for the rest of the class, using the evidence that had been collected.
You can read about this process in more detail here.
So those are my 5 Easy Ways to Add Movement in Your Class. I hope you were able to find some inspiration or ideas that you can use with your students. You can grab some strategies that you can use to add movement to your classroom here and check out some of my resources that include movement activities below:
Choose Your Ending: Exploring Conflict
Thanks for reading!
Jackie, ROOM 213
