A. The intention is to..
…introduce you to or remind you of descriptions of different groups/types of learning activities, and to invite you to reflect on the types of activities that you routinely organise for your students. The different activity types are ordered to illustrate increasing levels of learner independence.
B. The best way of tackling this is to..
…read through the descriptions of activity types, thinking about which activity types you tend to favour in your own planning.
While this looks like a relatively quick and interesting read it’s packed with information you may not have come across in this form previously. It’s a section you may want to return to for reminders again and again.
C. As a result it should have the following impact.
You will have a heightened awareness of the activities you tend to gravitate to, and an understanding of how you might broaden your repertoire.
Activity design categories
Types of Activities
All teachers design activities to help their students to access and understand the content of the lesson. These activities lie at the heart of lesson planning, linking what is to be learned with how it will be learned. While it is impossible to list all such activities, is it possible to discern some different types of activities, to identify some overarching categories or groups of activities?
Here we try to suggest a hierarchy of activity types, going from ‘Listening’, through to ‘Discovery’. This progression of activities: demands more of students; activates a wider/richer range of learning behaviours; and is underpinned by a shift of responsibility from the teacher towards the learner.
As you read through this section, think of the activities that you plan for your students and ask yourself which activity types you tend to favour. Also consider how you might adapt/tweak your usual activity types to offer students greater responsibility for their own learning.
Activity Type – ‘Listening’
The characteristics of a ‘Listening’ type activity are that:
- the outcomes, success criteria and content known to the teacher;
- students learn by listening to teacher exposition.
Essentially a relatively passive experience for learners unless the teacher overlays an activity that requires students to do more than simply listen. Nonetheless the fact that the activity is rooted in the exposition of ‘an expert’ (this ‘expert’ could be the teacher, or a U tube clip, or some other source of ‘expertise’) means that levels of learner independence are limited and the classroom culture is heavily teacher-focused.
This is not necessarily a bad thing – there are occasions when teachers must tell students ‘stuff’, and this is particularly the case when students would have no way of discovering the information for themselves. Used sparingly and only when necessary it is a valuable tool in the teacher’s arsenal, but used excessively or when not necessary it reduces students to being spectators rather than participators.
Activity Type – ‘Practising’
The characteristics of a ‘Practising’ type activity are that:
- the outcome, success criteria and content are known to learners;
- students engage in rehearsal or reinforcement or retrieval of content/skill.
Strategies might include: Past papers; Practice tests; Multiple choice tests; Quizzes; Writing an essay; Answering a spoken question; Testing yourself on your notes / flash cards; Creating (and answering) your own questions; Testing others and/or being tested by others.
Used for consolidation rather than new learning, ‘Practising’ is about helping students to struggle to recall something. When we struggle to remember something, it primes our brain to remember it more easily the next time we look. The brain gets the message that this memory must be important because we are looking for it. The more times we try to retrieve something, the stronger the memory gets. But it is the struggle that is important. If we reteach content instead of getting students to try and retrieve stuff they’ve probably forgotten, the memory does not get strengthened in the same way. It seems kinder but actually does students no favours.
The retrieval effect is stronger if we allow a bit of forgetting to happen before getting students to retrieve. Memories get stronger once retrieved if we have had time to forget them – bizarre as that sounds. Hence the need to spread such activities out into future lessons, spaced learning as it is sometimes called.
Activity Type – ‘Manipulating’
The characteristics of a ‘Manipulating’ type activity are that:
- students are given all of the information to work with;
- students have to manipulate the information by organising / sorting / ranking / sequencing.
Students begin ‘Manipulating’ type activities having been given all of the necessary information, usually broken up into smaller pieces. The task is to make sense of these pieces and to rebuild the whole. Re-building may require students to: sequence the information (a story or poem or historical events etc.); rank the information using some agreed criteria (Ranking); sort any information with an underlying pattern that can be discerned or created.
For more ideas, there are a number of ‘Manipulating’ type activities in The Teachers’ Toolkit (by Paul Ginnis), including ‘Ranking’.
View Ranking
Activity Type – ‘Assembling’
The characteristics of an ‘Assembling’ type activity are that:
- the information is given but is hidden / obscured;
- students have to sort the information, judge its relevance, and make sense of it for themselves.
Like ‘Manipulating’ in some ways, ‘Assembling’ differs in that although all the information is provided, it is obscured and students need to make judgments about its importance / relevance. It is this need for a critical appraisal of the information provided that sets ‘Assembling’ apart from ‘Manipulating’.
Consider the example given opposite – building a credible account from a range of sometimes conflicting eyewitness statements. Remove all of the conflicting or possibly biased statements and the task is reduced to synthesising similar statements into a credible account. No need to think critically about the statements, just create a summary. The effect is to reduce an ‘Assembling’ type task into a ‘Manipulating’ task.
‘Murder Hunt’ (see below) is an ‘Assembling’ activity because students need to identify and eliminate all of the irrelevant information and red herrings. Remove the irrelevant information in advance and it becomes a ‘Manipulating’ activity, organising the relevant clues without the need to think critically about their relevance.
Likewise, a ‘Manipulating’ activity can be turned into an ‘Assembling’ activity with a few tweaks. In its ‘Manipulating’ format, Tin Tin is little more than a jigsaw puzzle. But – adding a couple of pieces from a similar but different Tin Tin cartoon, or even removing a couple of key pieces and inviting students to create their own replacements, introduces the need for a more critical, ‘Assembling’ type approach.
For more ideas, there are a number of ‘Assembling’ type activities in The Teachers’ Toolkit (by Paul Ginnis), including ‘Murder Hunt’.
View Murder Hunt
Activity Type – ‘Finding – Enquiry’
The characteristics of an ‘Enquiry’ type activity are that:
- the outcome is known, success criteria are known, content is known, but the method is unknown;
- students determine their method for themselves.
The ‘Rock Salt’ activity was planned by a teacher in Glasgow who was exploring how he could give more control to his students. Read more about it and the impact it had on both himself and his students in the toggle below.
Read about this 'Enquiry' type activity ⬇️
What price control? How one school is starting to do things differently.
One of our consultants was working recently with a school that provides education for secondary aged children with social, emotional and behavioural needs, on full and part time placements. Additionally it offers support for primary aged pupils on a similar basis. They had undertaken a couple of days training, and the 12 teachers were set the challenge of undertaking a learning enquiry.
Typically such an enquiry is conducted in an area of interest for the individual teacher, and might be along the lines of:
‘If I assign roles to individuals before starting group work, will their inclination to engage purposefully with each other improve?’ or ‘If I stop repeating myself, will their listening skills improve?’ etc.
Notice that the teacher makes a conscious decision to change one of their existing teaching behaviours and monitors the impact that this has on their students.
The third day began with all 12 feeding back on their enquiries and the impact on their students. The feedback was fascinating in that all teachers had devised, quite independently, an enquiry that required students to take a greater responsibility for themselves as learners.
A science teacher described one of the enquiries thus:
“I’ve got my kids to do the experiment where they make salt from rock salt for years. Thus far I would tell them all they need to know to be successful, demonstrate the experiment to the whole class, and then ask them to repeat the experiment exactly as I had done it. It gave me control, took care of safety issues, and was as boring as it can get! Why, if you have just seen someone else do the experiment, would anyone be motivated to repeat it for themselves?
I explored my rationale for teaching in this way, and realised that, control aside, I believed that it enabled me to ‘deliver the course’, to ‘make sure’ they all had the revision notes they need, and to ‘convince myself’ that I had taught it well so that they simply must have learned it well. On reflection, this strategy was failing on all counts. Either I would have to re-double my efforts and ‘teach’ even more/better, or maybe there was another way . . . .
With trepidation, I went in with a lump of rock salt and a bowl of salt, and set them the challenge ‘I want you to find out how to make this (salt) from that (rock salt)’. I then sat down, refused to answer any further questions or offer guidance – and it was agony for someone so used to being the font of information in the classroom!
(I admit to making a couple of interventions relating to the safe use of Bunsen burners, but that aside I just let them get on with it.)
What a revelation! They all devised ways to make salt; they discovered the science behind it; they needed minimal external control; and I got a bit of a rest.
The students reported increased enjoyment levels, I reported reduced stress levels, and tests revealed a deeper scientific understanding than was previously the case.
My kids are challenging and frequently disruptive, so much so that mainstream schooling cannot handle them. How amazing that I gained more control and they achieved deeper learning when I stopped teaching for control and started letting them learn.
I realised that these kids need challenge and engagement, not control and instruction. I was afraid this change of approach would slow content learning down, but I was wrong. The learning was deeper and faster because they had done it for themselves, rather than observed it through the eyes of a science teacher. My kids were being scientists, not learning science.”
The room erupted with similar stories of potentially difficult students rising to challenge and ‘doing it for themselves’. One teacher commented “We never really believed our students could do this, but we were wrong!”
When asked what the common threads were through all of their enquiries, one teacher simply said “student power – give them responsibility and they will rise to it”.
Ask yourself what a comparable enquiry type activity in your own classroom might look like. What might be holding you back from giving it a go, or from using an activity of this type more frequently?
Activity Type – ‘Finding – Discovery’
The characteristics of a ‘Discovery’ type activity are that:
- the outcomes are unknown, the success criteria are unknown, the content is unknown, or at most loosely defined;
- students determine their own intended outcomes, success criteria, content and method for themselves.
Designing ‘wild tasks’.
Much of the time, classrooms are structured to ‘deliver’ the curriculum. Tasks are carefully designed by teachers to ensure that every child gets their predetermined dose of curriculum content, content that can be assessed so that progress can be evidenced. But what if we occasionally design tasks that are ‘wild’, that have no predetermined outcomes, that give learners free rein to explore areas of their own interest?
Begin by asking students to identify questions to which they would like to know the answer – as one school calls them, ‘big awe and wonder questions’. You may choose to sift them so that everyone chooses from a range of questions that the class considers of greatest interest rather than allow complete freedom of choice. Students then design and undertake their own enquiry into their preferred area of interest as a home learning project. Agreed, you could not operate like this all of the time (or could you??!!), but once in a while? What could possibly go wrong? What might the benefits be?
Return to Try Out 3
Comments are closed.