How to Get Students Actively Engaged: 5 Teacher Approved Techniques [episode 161]

Emily  0:36

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’ve got five techniques for engaging students in your lessons and a fun teacher approved tip for making a simple review game.

Heidi  0:48

We start our episodes with a morning message, just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is, what word did you miss in the school spelling bee? Emily, do you have a word that you missed?

Emily  0:56

Well, I don’t remember, but I know I’ve never been able to spell the word separate.

Heidi  1:06

Oh yeah.

Emily  1:07

Every time I spell it wrong.

Heidi  1:10

Well, you know Mom taught me how to spell that. She said you can’t separate pa from the rest of the family.

Emily  1:16

Why did she never? Mother? If you’re listening to this, you failed me. I’ve struggled for 40 years.

Heidi  1:25

I guess you know who her favorite child is.

Emily  1:28

Rude. Okay, what what did you flunk out of the spelling bee with Heidi?

Heidi  1:34

Well, very first round in the Leighton Hills Mall Spelling Bee I got out on occasionally, and I have never misspelled it since.

Emily  1:43

And you’ve probably never forgiven that word no. Well, we had some fun responses from our teacher approved community. Sarah forgot the t in kitchen. Understandable, yes. Casey got out on silhouette and still can’t spell it correctly without help.

Heidi  1:59

Yeah, that’s, I’m the same on that one.

Emily  2:02

Krista forgot the second D in hundredth. Oh yeah. Rita got out on Wednesday because she didn’t capitalize W, that’s ruthless, yeah? Nauseous took poor Dawn down, and Diane went out on genuine. Oh, yeah. Six year old Abby spelled errand, A, A, R, O N, because she had a friend named Aaron in class. Stephanie spelled lightning as lighting.

Heidi  2:34

I always spell lightning as lightening.

Emily  2:36

Yeah, I always have to correct that. Juror took down Peggy. That’s understandable, that word’s hard to spell and hard to say. Yes, it is. As a third grader, Amber went out on champagne. Well, that’s unfair. Yeah, that seems like a strange word choice for a third grade spelling bee.

Emily  2:56

Michelle is carrying a list of traumatic words, extinct, license, exercise. She says, I can’t remember the words I spelled right, but you don’t forget the ones you missed. Nope, you never do. We’d love to relive your spelling bee trauma over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi  3:13

That is what we’re there for. Have you ever had that moment as a teacher when you are excited to present a lesson and then it totally falls flat? You’re up there giving it your all, but nothing is going how you planned, and the kids are totally checked out.

Emily  3:28

It’s the worst feeling, and I know we have all been there before. There’s lots of reasons a lesson might tank. Maybe the content is too advanced, or the instructions are unclear, or maybe you didn’t include enough opportunities for your students to engage with the content.

Heidi  3:45

It’s important to remember that students must act for a lesson to impact

Emily  3:51

Ooh and because it rhymes, it must be true. If students aren’t interacting with the content, it kind of just becomes white noise like you know, the teachers in Charlie Brown like wa wa.

Heidi  4:06

There are lots of fun and creative lesson formats that invite students to participate: think, pair, share, jigsaw, gallery walks, all of those techniques that we hate doing in professional development trainings. But you’re in light, because today we are not looking at those cooperative learning structures. We are looking at ways to sprinkle in student engagement during a regular kids are in their seats, teacher is talking type lesson.

Emily  4:30

What we’re talking about today is active student response. There’s some variation in opinion about what qualifies as active student response. So we had to set up our own teacher approved criteria.

Emily  4:45

Our first criterion was that a technique must allow all students to participate. That means asking a question and choosing a name on a popsicle stick doesn’t fit because only one student is required to participate. Even if you’re hopeful that all the rest of them are thinking about the answer.

Heidi  5:02

And that is always the hope. But we’re not against choosing names to answer questions. It just can’t be your only means of getting students to respond during your lessons.

Emily  5:12

Yes, and we want active participation, not eventual participation. So I have who has cards and round robin activities aren’t included because those have a lot of waiting to participate time instead of actually participating time.

Heidi  5:31

We also want to highlight techniques that you can use to check student understanding. So even though something like think pair share is a great way to boost student engagement in the lesson, it doesn’t make the list of teacher approved active student response techniques. Because unless you can somehow listen in on every conversation at once, it doesn’t let the teacher know that everyone actually understands.

Emily  5:55

We also want to minimize opportunities for kids who are unsure about the answer to copy their more confident peers. Telling students to stand up if the answer is A and touch the floor if the answer is B, is a nice way to add movement. But again, it’s not telling you who understands the material, because kids who don’t know are just doing what everyone else seems to be doing.

Heidi  6:16

If a student response isn’t able to inform your teaching, meaning that you can adjust your instruction based on how your students respond, it doesn’t make the cut for an official teacher approved active student response technique.

Emily  6:29

Does that have an acronym?

Heidi  6:30

I was like, well, we could switch active no student, active response around. And then it could be TASART.

Emily  6:47

Okay, keep thinking about it. If we come up with it, we’ll share it.

Emily  6:51

Because we know you’re busy we specifically rounded up techniques that require a few materials. In fact, we are listing them from no materials to some materials to complicated materials. We’ll go through them one at a time, sharing the pros and cons of each and giving lots of suggestions for easy ways to implement these techniques in your lessons. So Heidi, kick us off with the first technique.

Heidi  7:12

Well our first technique is choral response. Now don’t get this confused with choral reading. In choral reading, the whole class is going through a whole text together and reading out loud. In choral response, students are giving just one word or a few words or a short sentence.

Emily  7:29

A big pro for choral response is that it’s simple to implement. You can add it to any lesson at any point, no supplies or preparation needed. Assuming you’ve addressed the biggest con for choral response, which is you need to teach your signal ahead of time and reinforce it each time you use it.

Heidi  7:48

Right. Since we are trying to minimize students blurting out, we don’t want to confuse them by then asking them to blurt. I would suggest a framework that includes both a verbal and a physical cue. For example, I might say on the count of three, I want everyone to tell me what state of matter ice is ready. 123, and then on three, I would do my signal. Maybe I’d cup one ear and point to the class with the other hand.

Emily  8:14

If kids respond with shouting the response instead of using a talking voice, I’d pause and revisit expectations before trying the prompt again. We have to hold kids accountable for meeting our standards if we want them to meet our standards.

Heidi  8:29

Thankfully, you won’t have to teach your prompt every time you want to use it. Once students are comfortable with it, you can just drop it into any lesson.

Emily  8:37

As your students respond, it’s important to listen to their answers. This is another con for choral response. It’s really hard to pick out the one or two kids saying liquid when the rest of the class is saying solid. So don’t rely on choral response as your only means for monitoring your student’s understanding.

Heidi  8:45

The most common way to use choral response is to have the whole class respond. But you can mix it up. You can have the left side of the room respond, or the middle row or table four, or just the girls, or all the kids wearing blue.

Emily  9:07

You can also mix things up by adding silly voices. For example, on the counter three, I want you to use a baby voice to tell me the name of this shape, or when I say talk, I want you to tell me the genre of this book in a robot voice. It’s a fun way to drop in a little bit of novelty into the structure of the routine.

Heidi  9:26

You can also tweak your choral response routine by using an echo prompt. So instead of having the class respond to your question, they’re going to echo another student’s response.

Heidi  9:36

So let’s say you ask, Which operation should you solve first in this problem? Now you direct your students to pay attention to their peers response, and then call on a student to answer. So let’s say you called on Asia, and after he answers, you give your prompt to the class. On the count of three, everyone echo Asia, and then your students respond, Isaiah said he would multi before adding.

Emily  10:01

This technique can be tricky, because students have to be able to hear a response and adapt it, but with some practice, most kids should be able to manage it okay.

Heidi  10:09

Well now let’s move on to my favorite technique, using signals. Assuming all your students are physically able to give a signal, it’s an easy way to engage your learners and check their understanding.

Emily  10:22

Yeah, I love this one. Definitely a go to. Thumbs up and thumbs down is probably the one we’re most familiar with. But there are lots of possibilities having students rate their understanding from fist meaning zero to five, meaning I know this concept well, is one of my favorites.

Emily  10:40

It’s why we use it in our jargon journal vocabulary lessons. When we introduce a new word to students, we ask them to rate how well they know that word from fist to five. As a teacher that helps me know which words might need extra discussion.

Heidi  10:55

Another example is asking students to show the number of fingers that matches the correct response. So for this one, you just need a multiple choice question with up to five possible answers. I guess you could use 10 if you want to use both hands. Ask students to show the number of fingers that correspond to the right answer.

Emily  11:11

And we use that technique in our jargon journal review lessons too. With the slides you can do that have them hold up the fingers for the correct answer. We will link to our jargon journal vocabulary activities in the show notes.

Heidi  11:25

And it’s not just for jargon journal. We include lots of student response techniques in our phonics and fluency in a flash lessons as well. Engaging students through responses increases understanding and helps the teacher identify issues. So we want to take advantage of all of those benefits.

Emily  11:42

Yeah, students have to act for lessons to have impact. See, it’s catchy. You can have students use signals to point. For example, point to the window if the answer is A, and point to the door if the answer is B. Or put your hand on your head if it’s true, put a hand on your shoulder if it’s false. Just avoid prompts about raising your right hand or left hand, because a lot of kids don’t know right from left, so it’s not particularly helpful.

Heidi  12:08

Yeah I’m a grown up, and I still struggle. As much as we love using signals. There are some downsides. One con is that you have to be strict about how students show their responses. If you say, give me a thumbs up if this shape is a quadrilateral, kids automatically just shoot their whole arm up into the air to show their thumbs up.

Emily  12:29

And the problem with that is the kid who was unsure sees this and just copies their neighbor. Now you don’t know who really gets it and who is confused. So as you use signals, remind kids often that you want them to keep their hands right in front of their chest so only you can see.

Heidi  12:45

And that’s why prompts like make your arm an elephant trunk if the answer is A, or stand on one foot if the answer is B, aren’t particularly useful for checking understanding. If you want to use those more active prompts, they’re very fun, just make sure you save them for questions where you’re not trying to monitor your students understanding.

Emily  13:04

A way that you can implement these more fun signals or even prompts like four corners that have students moving around the room, is to use them with questions that have multiple right options. For example, stand on this side of the room if you think the best description of this character is friendly, and stand on this side of the room, if the best description is nervous. The character might be friendly and nervous so now students are having to think at a deeper level about their response.

Heidi  13:30

As I was putting together this list of signal responses, I realized that having students make a plus sign, a minus sign, maybe an equal sign with their fingers would be pretty easy. But besides a question like, which sign would make this equation true, I couldn’t think of a way to use that response.

Heidi  13:49

But I know we have a lot of creative teachers listening. So if you have a suggestion of how to use plus, minus and equal signs, would you email us at [email protected]. We would love to share it with our listeners. And I could, I think that could be really fun for kids.

Emily  14:03

Yeah, our third response technique is to use signs. And there are so many options here. Students can hold up a card with yes on one side and no on the other. Or the card could say true false, fact or opinion, or any other two choice answer.

Heidi  14:14

Or you could give kids multiple cards that say things like, I agree, I disagree, I’m unsure, or always, sometimes never, and it depends. Students could have papers with multiple options and clip a clothespin to the page to signal their response. Or if you don’t want to use clothespins, they could just point to the correct answer on the page, just make sure that it is big enough for you to see from where you are standing.

Emily  14:43

You could make response fans by having strips of card stock with different answers all connected with a brad at the bottom, students hold up the right option to respond to a question.

Heidi  14:54

So I did this with different punctuation marks. I made a strip for the three ending punctuation marks and then stuck them together with a brad. Then I would display a sentence for the kids, and then they would hold up the correct punctuation to end that sentence.

Heidi  15:08

I learned after the first time I used these, though that I needed to use different colors on each one so I could quickly scan the room and be like, Oh, everybody’s blue, but these two red ones need some help or something. It’s really hard to spot the difference between a kid holding up a question mark and a kid holding up an exclamation point, if they’re, you know, way far at the back. So colors make it a lot easier.

Emily  15:29

Yeah, that makes sense. Using different colors would make that a lot easier on the teacher. But like, the signal response reminds students to hold their sign right in front of their chest so that the other kids don’t peak.

Heidi  15:41

You could have kids hold up different colored popsicle sticks or different colored plastic spoons. You could use emojis. I was also thinking you could do like a wheel, like we used to use for centers, back in the old days of teaching, you know what I mean, where you have a circle with all the possible responses on it, then you put another circle on top of it with just like a little wedge cut out.

Emily  16:01

Oh yeah, like a pie.

Heidi  16:03

Yes, and then you would put a brad through the center of both circles so that top circle can spin, and you make the answer visible by holding up the student responses. I’m demonstrating this with my hands. That’s not helpful. Hopefully that was clear.

Emily  16:17

Signs are fun for kids to use, and they make it easy to check for understanding with questions that include multiple options. The downside is the prep work and also the management. It’s easy for tools to turn into toys if you’re not clear about your expectations for how to use it.

Heidi  16:35

Our fourth technique for active student response is writing. Writing requires more thought from students than just the thumbs up, thumbs down, but it also requires more materials and more work for the teacher.

Emily  16:47

One of the most common ways to include writing is with whiteboards. They’re a classic for a reason, but don’t stop there. You can include writing with guided notes and exit tickets. You can give students sticky notes and tell them to blanket their desk by writing one response on each note. You can show an example and ask the kids to write the comment they would make if they were the teacher and their student did this work.

Heidi  17:10

You can have students mark up a handout or a reading passage, even simple symbols to show I already knew this or this is new information, can help keep kids engaged and help inform your instruction.

Emily  17:21

And that brings us to our last technique for active student response, and that is using technology. Technology has a lot of advantages. Students typically enjoy using it, and it gives a really clear picture of who understands and who doesn’t. But as I’m sure you know, technology also has lots of downsides.

Heidi  17:40

Yeah, besides the expense, there’s the hassle of managing students and managing the technology and hoping the internet is on your side that day. And things change so fast in the technological world, I kind of hesitate to make any recommendations, so hopefully these suggestions are still relevant by the time this episode airs.

Heidi  18:00

But Kahoot and Plickers are great ways to incorporate technology, Gimit, Pollmakers and Quizlet also have some great tools. Just make sure you try out everything before you let your students lose with it.

Emily  18:13

Hopefully we’ve given you some fun ideas for how to incorporate more active student response into your lessons. Not only does it make teaching more enjoyable, but it has so many benefits for the kids. Active student response promotes meaningful engagement of all students, increases participation while decreasing disruption, and it provides real time assessment information to teachers. Plus it’s simple to use and doesn’t require much planning or expertise, is effective with all subjects across all ages and settings even online.

Heidi  18:47

So really, there’s a lot of benefits to using it. So try challenging yourself to incorporate more student response into your lessons. Look for opportunities to include choral response, signals, signs, writing, and technology and technology into your lessons and watch your classes engagement soar.

Emily  19:04

We’d love to hear about your favorite active student response techniques. Come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  19:13

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip. Each week we leave you with a small actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is make a simple game with a name picker tool. That sounds fun. Tell us more about it, Heidi.

Heidi  19:27

Online-stopwatch.com, and we will link to it in the show notes, has a bunch of fun name picker styles like a Jack in the Box and a claw game. The idea is that you can use it to randomly draw a student name to answer a question. And that is great if you want to use it that way, but I think with some creativity, we can turn this into a fun learning activity.

Heidi  19:48

Now to do this, instead of adding student names to the list, you would add short questions like math problems you know a word, and have students identify the part of the speech, vocabulary word, science term or any type of question that is very short. Then you can choose a student to come up and smash the piggy bank or catch a fish or shake the magic eight ball.

Heidi  20:08

And when the question comes up, use some of those active response techniques that we just talked about. So you could give your kids a few seconds to think and then prompt them for a choral response so easy. Or you could get out the whiteboards and markers and have your class write their answers. It’s really just a fun way to get some quick review in.

Emily  20:27

We’ve talked about online-stopwatch.com before when we talked about class timers. It’s a handy site, but it does have ads, so if you want to display this in your class, it might be worth upgrading to the ad free version, just in case an inappropriate ad pops up.

Heidi  20:41

Yeah, nobody wants that.

Heidi  20:44

To wrap up the show, we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily  20:49

I’m giving extra credit to the game Oregon Trail. Like many children of the 80s, the Oregon Trail was my first computer game played on those old Mac computers in the elementary school computer lab. And I am not much of a video gamer these days, but I thought it would be fun for my son and I to have a game we could play together, because he’s very into his Nintendo switch right now.

Emily  21:16

So I picked up the new Oregon Trail game. It’s technically a one player game, but we play it together so that we can talk through all the decisions, and he can do all the hunting and fishing, because I don’t want to do that. And I know I’m bringing a hefty dose of nostalgia to playing this game, but I really do think that the premise holds up well, and we have had a ton of fun playing this lately.

Heidi  21:37

Have you made it to Oregon yet?

Emily  21:39

We did. We only lost one member of the party, named after my youngest child and it feels fitting.

Heidi  21:46

I can imagine she wasn’t exactly pulling her weight on that journey.

Emily  21:51

No, she was not. What are you giving extra credit to Heidi?

Heidi  21:55

My extra credit goes to Isaac Dusku, who is also known as Lord of Maps. He’s a young guy who likes to draw pretty maps. Last year, I gave his book High Points to Emily’s son for Christmas, he gets all the good stuff, doesn’t? He does. It’s an awesome book with the highest point in each state on its own cutout page. So when the book is closed, you have this whole vista of tiny hills and massive mountains, and he loved it.

Heidi  22:24

So I had to pre order the new book that came out this year called The Lord of Maps Draws a Map. It walks kids step by step through how to draw your own fantasy map. So hopefully he likes this one too. It came with some PDFs of practice pages, so I will print those out and get him some nice pens. And I think I deserve a gold star for having a Christmas present already.

Emily  22:46

Yeah, and a good one. I think he’s gonna like it. He gets all the good stuff because he likes the interesting stuff. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he likes Oregon Trail and maps. So I think maybe those two things are related.

Heidi  23:00

That’s it for today’s episode. Remember, students must act for lessons to have an impact, so incorporate plenty of active student response techniques into your lessons. And don’t forget this week’s teacher approved tip to use a name picker tool to make a simple learning game.

Emily  23:15

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts. Ratings and reviews are so helpful to us because they help new listeners find our show.