MTV Strategy #1 -Chalk Talk
Engaging students in the classroom can be difficult thing to do. Often times many students may feel intimidated by their peers out of fear that they might be judged for their ideas or what they have to say. One activity that encourages student learning is known as the “Chalk Talk”. This activity is both interactive and simple to conduct because it only requires a prompt, pencil, poster board, and post it-notes.
This routine allows students consider concepts or questions in a quiet setting that is free of judgement, interruption, or influence from other colleagues. Such a setting allows students to relax about their ideas they’d like to present, which is why the chalk talk proves to work so well in the classroom. In doing this, the teacher’s role in this is to encourage students to be more open about their ideas and questions to create a better and safer learning environment.
For example, given the prompt: “Why should we educate ourselves about other cultures?” students are given the chance to:
- Bounce their ideas off one another anonymously
- Promote their thinking intuitively
- Follow up on their thoughts by examining other viewpoint made by their peers by commenting
How can this be performed?
Lesson Plan (In 3 Simple Steps):
- -Using something such as a poster board with the prompt used earlier, (why should we educate ourselves about other cultures?) is a great way to get students brainstorming. –
- After announcing the prompt to the class, go around passing a few post-it notes to each of the students and patiently wait until everyone was done posting their ideas on the poster. In this way, no one knows who wrote what and everyone has the chance to put up at least one of their ideas.
- Once everyone is finished, verbally review and go over all of the ideas that the students came up with for the prompt to construct a classroom discussion.
Using strategies like the “Chalk Talk” are important to implement in teaching because it gives students the ability to express themselves in the classroom anonymously. This makes learning more of a ‘judge-free’ zone regardless of someone’s gender, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. as well as giving shy/timid students a voice and being able to have the chance to be more engaged in the classroom. These strategies promote equity in the classroom, so that everyone can brainstorm their own ideas regardless of their identity.
For a visual representation of how this strategy can be conducted, here is a video that goes into more depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doXtVENCq8M
MTV Strategy #2-Tug-Of-War
Many a time, students are unsure about where and how to take a stance on a certain issue. To be able to provide reasoning as to why one side is more favored than another by that student is a critical skill to have. This is where the MTV strategy “Tug-Of-War” comes into play.
The purpose of this strategy is to encourage students to initially avoid choosing a side and to allow them to instead think carefully about the ‘tugs’ or ‘pulls’ that were used to make a student choose the side that they did.
Lesson Plan (In 3 Simple Steps):
- Create a controversial question to stir up a debate in the classroom, such as “Can money buy you happiness?”
- Once the question is open to the students, allow them to split up in groups based on their thinking and to give them the chance to create conversation with opposing sides to understand why the other groups chose their respected side and why. This allows students to be exposed to other students different thinking and how they got the ideas they did.
- Once the conversation is over, students “Share the thinking”(Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011) and learn from one another in the process.
The “Tug-Of-War” strategy allows students to create discussions with one another when debating on a certain issue. In the process, both sides can learn from one another and essentially think in a different way than they would’ve when first approached with the issue. This is important to implement into the classroom because everyone thinks differently, and the more we learn from one another, the better we will be at understanding each other and promoting equity in the classroom.
An example of this activity being performed in a more visual/”Chalk Talk” manner can be found here under this pinterest link!