Chat Stations, Summarizing, and Google Earth Voyager!

This week I had the opportunity to do my first round of social studies classroom walk-throughs! It was really great getting to see the teachers in their classrooms interacting with their students. I went in with three main goals:

• Gain an understanding of how our teachers are forming relationships with their students
• Collect information about the types of instructional strategies being used in classrooms
• Provide a follow-up email with a resource based on the learning objectives and instructional strategies I observed

I visited seven classrooms, and I emailed each teacher the next day with some positive feedback and a resource tailored to the learning that was happening in their classroom.

Here are a few resources/strategies I shared:

Chat Stations

In one classroom, students were learning about the effects of the railroad during Industrialism. They had read an article and were discussing and answering them on their papers in small groups. Their teacher would then have some students share out in the whole group. 

While their discussions were really good, there were a few areas for growth. The students were sitting in their seats the entire time, and the energy level was a little low. Some had their heads down the entire time. Also, when it came time for students to share their thoughts with the whole group, it seemed like the same students volunteered and shared. 

I suggested that the teacher try "Chat Stations", which is a strategy shared by Jennifer Gonzalez (@cultofpedagogy) in a blog post titled "Students Sitting Around Too Much? Try Chat Stations." In this chat station activity, students move from station to station and have small group discussions in response to a discussion prompt. 

Here are some of the benefits Gonzalez mentions in her post:

• increases movement into instruction, helping the brain function better
• allows teachers to interact more with students on a one-on-one setting
• incorporates novelty, which increases their memory of the discussions

Summarizing: Somebody Wanted But So

In another classroom, students were writing a summary of a text they had read about the battles of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The students had highlighted the main ideas and supporting details in the text, and they were using that to write their summary on a Google Doc. 

Summarizing can be a challenging skill to teach students, especially if they struggle with reading comprehension. A few of the students seemed to be struggling with how to take the information they highlighted and transform that into a clear, concise summary. 

I suggested that the teacher try a summarizing strategy called "Somebody Wanted But So." This strategy was shared by Glenn Wiebe (@glennw98) in a blog post titled "'Somebody Wanted But So' Makes your kids smarter." This is a scaffolding tool that helps students improve their summarizing skills. 

According to Wiebe, this strategy is great for:

• seeing the main ideas and specific details
• identifying cause and effect
• making sense of multiple points of view

Google Earth

A couple of teachers mentioned that they were having students practice geography skills as part of their "Bell Work." These were typically worksheets that they went over together as a class. In one particular classroom, this practice was followed by a lesson about the causes of WWII. 

I reached out to the teacher after the lesson and shared a resource from Google Earth called Google Earth Voyager: War in the Pacific. This activity guides students through a tour of the sites and remnants of some of the greatest battles of WWII, and it provides background knowledge about each site. Google Earth also recently added creation tools that allow people to "author, collaborate, and share digital stories mapped across the canvas of the planet." You can read about it in this blog post, "Create your own maps and stories in Google Earth." We discussed how he could use Google Maps and Google Earth as a way to help students develop geography skills in an engaging way.

Next Steps

When I reached out to each teacher, I offered to meet and help plan how they could try the new strategy/resource with their students. I had several teachers reply that same day and say they would be interested, so I'm super excited to collaborate with these teachers and get into some more classrooms!