Movement In The Classroom
How many minutes per class period do your students move?
Ok, now think back to the last non-PE professional development you attended. How many minutes of movement did you experience as an attendee?
Don’t feel too guilty if your numbers were in the single-digits. As someone who has presented professional development and taught classes with students, I’m just as guilty of forgetting to incorporate this key lesson element. Sometimes I try to think of how to add movement to a technology PD session but can’t come up with a way to make it work. It can be tough!
One way is to start with questions like the ones at the beginning of this post. I presented a session about movement in the classroom and used these as bellringer questions. Participants wrote their numbers down on sticky notes.
For one session, where participants rated their own classes, we used a collaborative learning strategy I learned at a PD session by Becky Duprey to line up in the hallway sorted from lowest to highest numbers. We were then able to ask questions to become a live bar graph by raising hands. For example, “Raise your hand if you teach elementary.” Unsurprisingly, the higher numbers represented the lower grades and the lower activity numbers tended to represent higher grades.
For a different conference where I repeated the session I went with the second question, the one about their last PD experience. (I worried the “rate yourself” question was too negative.) The participants again wrote their responses on sticky notes, but this time brought them up to the presenter screen to place them on a bar graph grid in my slides. We then could see our data together and talk about it (followed by me hurrying to take all the notes off so we could proceed with the presentation.)
The impetus for the session was a chapter from the book, Teaching With The Brain In Mind by Eric Jensen. Before reading it, I had no idea how important movement and exercise are in the brain’s process of learning. The chapter is available to view here: https://www.ascd.org/books/teaching-with-the-brain-in-mind-2nd-edition?chapter=movement-and-learning_
Additionally, Wendy Suzuki gave a great TED talk about how exercise can help aid memory. The video can be found here: https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_suzuki_the_brain_changing_benefits_of_exercise
In a nutshell, your brain is a hungry piece of equipment and any time you pump more oxygen into it can help with learning, memory, attention, behavior, and some mental health issues like depression.
It may be yet another thing to consider planning into a lesson as a teacher, but if you’ve ever had to sit through a day like a student’s, you’ll know that sitting all day is hard. On top of that, a full classroom is full of carbon dioxide - so those learning brains definitely need some help getting an oxygen boost!
Students can get the blood pumping to their brains through brain breaks like those on Go Noodle (https://www.gonoodle.com/) or through actions as basic as just standing up.
You can build activity into your lessons through things like:
Station rotation centers where students are required to physically move between stations regularly within a class period (for a treasure trove of station rotation ideas for upper grade levels, check out Catlin Tucker’s blog and books. Blog: https://catlintucker.com/)
Using wall space inside and out of your classroom to create group workspaces such as giant wall sticky notes or whiteboards.
Using classroom or hallway space to do collaborative learning structures like making and/or folding a line.
Setting up activities where students walk around to different prompts tacked to the walls while recording on clipboards, as opposed to doing the same activity as seatwork.
Breakout boxes - these can be a bit of work to prepare, but few things get students as excited as a well-executed breakout box challenge. Hide clues all over the room to get the class moving.
Standing to turn and talk with a partner during “wait time” after you ask a question.
Incorporating review games where students have to stand to play and sit when they are “out.”
Jigsaw and other activities where students have to switch between groups and share their learning.
Role-play where students stand to act out something as partners.