Lesson planning

how can we create student led lessons?

When it comes to Sunday afternoon lesson planning it's very tempting to throw some content on some slides amd plan some sort of activities around them. Do you ever get to that point In a lesson where you realise that you've not really asked pupils to think for themselves, where pupils have essentially copied from the board?

It's tempting to tell ourselves that activities are a waste of time, that getting pupils to move round the room is just a chance for them to be off task. From what I've observed and seen, pupils learn best when they are finding information, investigating, exploring concepts and ideas through student led activities. When we as teachers can let go of the lesson and let students lead on it then we will see our students deepen and enhance lessons.

So how can we essentially get pupils to copy off the board but through student led activities?

- place information sheets around the room and pupils collect information from these sheets

- create a 'market place' where students are trading information between themselves

- create hot seating opportunities where the pupil in the hot seat has some information on an event or a person and the rest of the class need to question them and record the answers.

- put,pupils into groups and give them a research sheet but they need to record the information down as pictures. This makes sure they can't copy off the sheet. They have to process the information and convert it into a series of explainable pictures.

Any other ideas then please let me know via twitter @crawleyJC