LEARNING AND TEACHING

LEARNING AND TEACHING I had fun with my mid-set Year 9 English class two weeks ago and I think they did as well because we all played games! Well, to be truthful, they thought that they were playing games but in actual fact a lot of deep learning was taking place at the same time. The class had been working extremely hard to not only recap the literary techniques they learnt last year but also locate them in the short story and poem they had been studying. Their assessment task was to compare a poem with a short story. The class started the comparison by completing an interactive Venn Diagram and this brought up gaps in their knowledge and ability to lengthen their responses. I could have made a work sheet and got them to complete a table to remedy this issue but I wanted to do something different, where they became autonomous and hard at work while I could sit and listen to their answers…. So I came up with this: It’s really simple. Buy a large outdoor snakes and ladders game ( this one is from Amazon) and put questions based on the two texts on as many squares as you like and then play Snakes and Ladders. I chose to use the questioning stems from the thinking dice and then asked the students to generate 10 questions (and answers) of their own relating to the two texts. Half the class then played the game, answering the questions that they landed on. The rest of the class listened to the answers and told them whether they were right/wrong or needed to add more detail to their answer. If a question arose that they could not answer, we then paused the game and had a class discussion ( some of the answers became the question stems for the next question). My class played the game for the full 50 minutes, and they were all thoroughly engaged; creating and answering questions in FANTASTIC detail which really motivated and stretched them. It was a delight to witness. The logical extension was for them now to create their own snakes and ladders games. There were very few rules except that they HAD to include at least two questions based on each of the four SOLO Taxonomy stations. Of course, they also had to write the answers to the questions. This activity was the true test and their questions and responses would show the depth of their learning. As a further aid, I gave each group a mini mark scheme to assist them with the design of their game.

The results were staggering; both in the quality of the questions and in their answers.

This is one example of a boardgame created by a group of four students. Of course this group, as a bonus, was allowed to recreate their board game on computer and their result ended up looking like this. Notice the SOLO station signs which indicated the degree of challenge for each question.

Charles Snyman