Being Active in the Classroom

In the days of students of almost all ages being engaged by a screen or some kind of device, the need for students to be engaged in some kind of activity during class is important. The greatest thing about activity in the classroom is that any classroom of any income and population. In our school, we have a gym teacher who also teaches regular classroom classes (Social Studies/History) and she does an amazing job of every period, for the first 5 minutes they do a body warmup.

We have had many discussions in the hallway about her approach to what she does and I must say, what she tells me is very convincing. She emailed me a link that showed what she was trying to tell me. This came from a Columbia University in 2014, which basically explained that students who were involved in active learning type activities, such as a simple stretching activity or even taking a ‘writing walk/nature walk’ for the first 5 minutes of class. Doing these simple activities can raise a students engagement in the learning by 8% because they are focused and have burned off that ‘bored energy’ as she called it. As a young teacher, I didn’t realize this, but she has been doing this for 4 years now and she has actually taken data from her own tests and quizzes to show the Principal that being active actually does provide adequate learning. Now, of course there are many variables to these kinds of data outlooks, but for the classrooms that she didn’t do the pre-learning exercise, their tests and quizzes fell about 6.5% shorter than students who were able to have a certain type of exercise to begin class.

What I have been able to do to provide my students with exercise and activity is once a week, we either walk around the school or around the outside of the school and have students describe what they see using sensory details. I have been able to modify these activities to allow it to work for my English classroom. Being a 2nd year teacher, I can’t say that I have enough data to see if my activities and active learning is benefiting my students but it truly does make classroom management a lot easier, like what the gym/classroom teacher said, it burns off the ‘bored energy.’

In our most recent inservice, we were shown this chart from an educational provider that as a school use for video references and other materials and I love it. It makes perfect sense that if we can engage and involve students in walks and stretching, they will have a better chance of remembering items in the future! If I can get all my students toward the bottom of the pyramid, I can help build students into successful learners for their high school careers, especially as an 8th grade teacher.