My Favorite Class Activities

Many of the class activities I developed had to be integrated with pre-planned lessons provided to me by the Global Classrooms program. After getting to know the class a bit more, I found it useful to incorporate their interests and background rather than stick too closely to the prescribed curriculum . Usually, I gave a presentation by the program and followed it with my own interactive activity to put the given skill into practice.

Intro to Note-Taking

I was quite surprised at the success of a lesson I gave on how to take notes. As 14-15 year old students, I figured they had been taking notes long enough to have an idea of the process, but so many of them insisted on copying every word on my slideshows that I knew it was time for a review on how to prioritize information. I began the class with a presentation about note-taking provided by the GC program, and received a chorus of groans when I explained that yes, they had to take notes on note-taking. The presentation contained some useful slides, including an explanation of Cornell notes and shorthand techniques:

Source: https://slideplayer.com/slide/7518626/

Source: https://slideplayer.com/slide/7518626/

To my surprise, after the first couple slides the students ended up quite engaged in the lesson and had a decent amount of questions. I included additional commentary on learning styles and explained that depending on their specific one (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc), they might find that different note-taking techniques would be more or less useful for different people. Putting this individual component into the lesson proved to be a successful way of indirectly forcing them to take ownership of their individual learning and note-taking processes.

I followed the lesson with a TED Talk called "How to Make the World a Better Place by 2030" that introduced some interesting GC-related content. This killed two birds with one stone because it provided an engaging opportunity for students to practice their new note-taking skills while simultaneously outlining a later lesson plan about the millennium development goals. High school students tend to enjoy TED Talks and this was one of several times that I incorporated them into my GC lesson plans.

Four Corners

I found that one of the best ways to practice debate vocabulary was with a game called Four Corners. Given its popularity back home in the classroom, I was surprised that students here weren't familiar with it and thus took the opportunity to make it as engaging as possible. I preceded the game with a presentation provided by the Global Classrooms program about useful debate vocabulary, which included charts such as this one:

Source: Fulbright Madrid Mentors

After reviewing words the students weren't familiar with, and ensuring that they had taken good notes, I started the Four Corners game, wherein each corner of the room represents the extent to which they agreed with a given statement: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree. I then read various statements for them to debate, with the goal of practicing the new vocabulary we had learned. Students were to stand in the corner of the room that represented their opinion on the statement, talk for a few moments in their respective corners to consolidate their arguments, and then present them to the class more or less on the fly. Some examples of these statements are as follows:

• Celebrities make too much money.

• The voting age should be lowered to 16.

• Medical marijuana should be fully legalized.

• School uniforms should be mandatory.

• Cheerleading is a sport.

Depending on the size of the class, I would have smaller groups stand up at a time to debate a given statement with the rest of the class taking notes. After hearing a representative of all points of view, I would invite students to change corners if they wanted to.

I chose to make the debate about different topics outside of the prescribed GC one because at this point in the semester we had spent a great deal of time talking about "juvenile crime and violence as an effect of socio-economic conditions." It was more important to me that they felt engaged and motivated to use the new vocabulary with a fresh topic to avoid the class getting bored of the same material.

You may find a more extensive version of this activity in my post entitled, "Final Project: Global Classrooms."