Discover students’ misconceptions. See if students can identify what is the correct answer when given a false fact. It’s useful when going over a previous lesson. It encourages students to think deeply and wager all the possibilities.
Make a worksheet or a survey that has a list of questions (make them specific) about your topic, and ask students to circle (or check) the ones they don’t know the answers to. Then, let them turn in the paper.
Create corners concerning different questions that were circled. Let your students work on the extra exercises and explanation in the corners, individually. As your students will all have circled different questions, you have to give each student a different and personalized order to visit the corners.
Ask the winner
Ask students to silently solve a problem on the board. After revealing the answer, instruct those who got it right to raise their hands (and keep them raised). Then, all other students have to talk to someone with a raised hand to better understand the question and how to solve it next time.
Student pair activities
Pair-share-repeat
After a Think-pair-share experience, which I’ve written about in the first interactive learning lesson idea, you can also ask students to find a new partner and share the wisdom of the old partnership to this new partner.
Teacher and student
Let students brainstorm the main points of the last lesson. Then, pair up your students and assign them 2 roles. One of them is the teacher, and the other the student. The teacher’s job is to sketch the main points, while the student’s job is to cross off points on his list as they are mentioned and come up with 2 to 3 points that the teacher missed.
