Movement Based Classroom Teaching

Today I thought we would talk about a teaching strategy. This strategy is particularly effective for early childhood and primary school teachers, as well as teachers who have students with ADD and ADHD or strong sensory preferences for movement. 

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Penelope Webb 0:05

Welcome to The Exceptional Humans Podcast, where we discuss questions related to language, identity, education, and behavior. I'm your host, Penelope and I have a background in education, linguistics, and behavioral science. Welcome to another Unscripted Strategies discussion. Today I thought we would talk about a teaching strategy. This strategy is particularly effective for early childhood and primary school teachers, as well as teachers who have students with ADD and ADHD or strong sensory preferences for movement. This strategy incorporates a few different hits, high impact teaching strategies and I refer to it as the bounce strategy. So for this strategy, what you are doing is you are utilizing movement, the ability for students to engage in social interactions with their peers and chunking. It also allows teaching staff, teacher aids, whoever is in the classroom within a instructional capacity to move around the room and check in with individual students. So for this strategy, what you do is generally get students moving between two spaces in the classroom. So for this, say you've got a carpeted area in front of a whiteboard or a smart board, where you are presenting material and instructions, and then you have the students' individual workspaces, whether that is group desks, whether that is individual desks or a less structured seating or standing environment. What you then do is you break down each set of instructions and task component and present them individually. So for this, say you are doing a writing task and you want the students to start the writing task by recording the date or the title of the task, or a learning objective as the first thing that they are going to write in their books. You would model writing that information, either on a whiteboard or a smartboard, and then bring up a digital timer. I really like radial countdown timers or timers that present a countdown clock with a restful image and some background music. I've found both to be very effective depending on time of day. Radial timers tend to work on a sense of urgency, so if it's after lunch where everybody's slowing down a bit, everybody's feeling a bit sleepy, a radial timer can work really nicely because there's a sense of urgency, so it hypes everybody up a little bit more. However, for the start of the day where everybody is pretty awake, got a fair bit of energy, something like a countdown timer with a little picture of a rainforest and some nature sounds, can be really good at just keeping that energy nice and calm and maintaining pace. Then you model what you're expecting students to do writing the date, writing a title, writing a learning objective. You tell them how much time they've got, I usually work in one, two, or five minute chunks, and you start the timer and off they go. Again this allows students to go and record that information, but also if they want to then come back to the carpet and they want to have a little chat to their friends while they're waiting for everyone else to finish up, it allows for that. It allows those students that really need to access movement to do that within that timeframe. It also allows for you to go around and individually help students, particularly students that may have issues with manipulating pencils or maintaining pencil grip or anything along those lines. It allows you to go and assist those students. It also allows you to check that everybody has followed through on that instruction. From there, you continue to break down the tasks into bigger and bigger chunks with increased task complexity and increasing the number of instructions from a single instruction to multiple instructions as you proceed through the activity. Not only does this strategy provide structure for students who are neurodivergent, particularly those students who have ADD and ADHD, it can also help slow down those students that rush their work and make simple errors, particularly in writing, as well as providing motivation for those students that often struggle to keep up with their peers during extended individual tasks. The structure of the strategy also allows teachers and other adults assisting with instruction to spend time working with individual students or groups of students during the session, which they may not otherwise get a chance to do. It can also help classroom teachers with the pacing of their day. So particularly for early years and primary teachers, when you have your class and you're presenting multiple subjects throughout a school day, it is quite important to change up the pacing and the presentation of those sessions to keep students engaged and minimize the possibility that you are going to get any behavioral issues happening throughout the day. I would love to know what you think of this strategy, whether you have ever tried a strategy similar to this before, or you would be willing to incorporate it into your teaching. The Exceptional Humans Podcast is written and recorded on Kabi Kabi and Jinibara lands. We would like to pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging, and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today.