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EELDRC – Focus on Enroll

EELDRC reminds us to use enroll, experience, label, demonstrate, review and celebrate in designing our lessons to achieve higher levels of student engagement and success. Let's have a closer look at enroll. How do we truly engage our students? The process is different for different age levels, but our common goal is to capture their interest and attention and enroll them in the experience of learning the content – we want to wake them up to learn! Here are some ideas:

Open a new lesson by asking an interesting question that most of the students can relate to or answer yes to, such as “How many of you have seen a really scary movie?”
Designate leaders by having students point to the person in their small group who is wearing the most blue or has the longest hair, curliest hair, shortest hair (for example).
Ask students to stand up for a quick review or partner activity to stretch muscles and circulate fresh oxygen to the brain.
Use scents like popcorn or cinnamon. Smells evoke memories and grab attention like nothing else! Use a scent connected to your content.
Start the class with a brain teaser, puzzle, joke or riddle that is connected to the day’s content.
Introduce yourself at the beginning of the school year by playing a video or slide show about yourself. When students know you better they care more deeply about what you're teaching.
Play music from a current TV show such as Jeopardy, Survivor, or another show that will capture students' attention and speak dramatically over the music saying, for example, “Welcome to geography” over Survivor.
Tell a story that engages emotions or helps add personal meaning to an abstract idea. Relevance is a great enroller!
Wear or carry a prop (can be silly or serious) to introduce a new topic. For example, carry a magnifying glass on the day you introduce a scientific “mystery.” Wear a judicial robe to hold court in your classroom when you are working with geometric proofs. Have the homework be the "documents" and let students be lawyers to “object” or agree with the “proof” of the mathematical problem.
Stop a lecture to play a game that enlivens the atmosphere and gives the brain a short break and burst of energy.
Teach in a different room or from a different spot in the room for a day. Change the seats, move the direction in which the seats face, or change where you stand to deliver content.
Rearrange the furniture in the classroom. Ask the students what changes they’d like to see in the environment and implement the ones that are reasonable and possible.
Pass around content-related objects that are interesting to touch, like rough twine, modeling clay, part of an airplane model, a sponge, a photo.
End the class with a cliffhanger to “hook” students into what is happening tomorrow.
Play a song of the day at the start of class. Ask students at the end of the lesson why they think it was played or chosen.
Have students design, make and play a game that is topic centered.
Have students modify song lyrics to reflect course material. Next, have them perform it!
Have students write creative mnemonics for new material and share them with the rest of the class.
Conduct a “talking-stick” discussion in which a small group sits in a circle sharing their ideas. The person holding the stick shares his or her thoughts then holds the stick out and whoever wishes to speak next takes it. Everyone in the group listens intently to the person holding the stick as it is passed from one person to another until all who wish to speak have done so. A variation on this idea is to have one small group sharing ideas while the rest of the class watches. Every few minutes rotate new people into the talking-stick group.
Have your students write test questions and answers. Use them on a practice test.
Display a long list of information, material or content. Have learners organize it however they wish (Venn Diagram, outlines, graphic organizer, mind map, web, using color).
Use jigsaw grouping to quickly disseminate lots of content material.
Teach your learners how to set goals. Outline action steps for the day, week, month, quarter, semester, year and beyond. Dream big and put it on paper – write it down, make it happen!
Use color purposefully to improve memory (color-code concepts), brighten a room (with lots of posters and peripherals), and influence mood (for example, yellow energizes, red puts us on alert, green is soothing, blue is trusting).
Have students walk and talk through a review of yesterday’s concept or what they are looking forward to in today’s learning.
Remind students to sit up straight. Have them all stand up to stretch. Poor posture puts stress on the back and can cause joint and muscle pain. Upright posture enrolls us mentally.
Establish learning stations in different parts of the room and send groups of students to learn a key idea at each station.
Use music. Play fifties music and teach students the hand jive. Connect the opening song to the history lesson of the day.
Have students visualize a time in the future when they will benefit from the material they are learning. Depending on their age level they could be in fifth grade or in a college-level course sharing the information with a younger sibling, a teacher, or a classmate.

Published Aug 20 2008, 07:01 PM by admin

Filed under: QL Club

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