How can children show us what they know?
I’ve just picked up a copy of Engagement edited by Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman. This is one of their Best of the Best practical classroom guides and there is plenty to go at!
There are various chapters worth picking over and one of them is by poet, speaker and digital toolmaker John Davitt.
His latest project is the title of the chapter too – ‘The 300-Way Learning Method’. This method encourages us to think more deeply about all the different ways we can demonstrate what we know. There are more than we think and certainly more than we use!
John describes students as “turbocharged learning resources” but they don’t always get used as such especially if we only ever get them to show us what they know through writing. Writing is just one method.
Wallace and Kirkman (2018) encourage us to make use of John’s 200-ways generator and I urge you to take a look and share it widely with colleagues too.
It’s so easy to use: type in a word or concept that you want children to showcase and hit generate and one of 200 different ways will be selected. These go from 20 second raps, a Furoshiki design, a nursery rhyme, a mashup of two musical styles or a political broadcast to name but a few.
You can hit generate or children can keep hitting generate themselves until they find something that they’d like to have a go at. This works well when you are covering the same concept but then have five different groups working on their own demonstration method.
From something fairly mundane, a huge number of enjoyable learning experiences can sprout forth!
