OER4Schools/Techniques

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How to make traffic lights

Making robots/traffic lights:

There are various ways of making this resource depending on the availability of materials. Some suggestions of different materials are:

• coloured paper (red, orange, green) such as charts, paper from old magazines etc.
• coloured packing cardboards such as toothpaste box
• coloured computer printouts
• cloth material
• coloured plastic bags
• coloured flags or
• simply coloured pencils or crayons (if each child has them).

Given below is one simple way of making them with a white A4 sheet of paper and marker pens.

Educator note

Provide the following materials to the participants so that they can make their own robot/traffic light resource:

• A4 sheets of paper (one per three participants, but it is always better to have some extra)
• Red, Orange and Green marker pens
• Crayons/ coloured pencils/ paints (if available)
• Scissors/ long scale (if available)

Normally 10-15 minutes are sufficient for this activity if enough material is available for each participant. Enough material means that there is negligible or no waiting time for using material.

Where materials to make the resource are not available in sufficient quantities for classroom use, you could think of alternatives, such as children giving various hand signals corresponding to red / yellow / green.

Individual work (11 min). Follow these steps to make your own robot/traffic lights resource for AfL (see pictures for reference):

• Take an A4 sheet of white paper. Fold it along the long side into 3 equal parts (one sheet can make 3 sets of Traffic Lights). Cut along the folds with scissors or tear using a long scale to make 3 strips of paper.
• Fold one strip further into 3 sections along the short side.
• Write ‘RED’, ‘ORANGE’ and ‘GREEN’ (in capitals and bold) using the right coloured marker pens (if possible) on the three different sections. You can colour them with respective colours if crayons, coloured pencils or paints are available.
• Now reverse the strip of paper or keep it upside down. Then,
  • behind section RED, write: I’m stuck. I need some extra help. I don’t feel I have progressed.
  • behind section ORANGE, write: I’m not quite sure. I need a little help. I feel I have made some progress.
  • behind section GREEN, write: I understand fully. I’m okay without help. I feel I have progressed a lot.

No hands up

This is a useful technique to engage all of the students all of the time. The teacher poses a question for the students to think about and tells them, either before or after asking the question, that there should be 'no hands up' as everyone is expected to participate. The teacher then calls on a random student to answer the question. Staging questioning this way can motivate students and keep them focused on the shared input as well as giving less confident children the chance to share their ideas.

Here are the steps:

1. Students listen to a question or a discussion point and are given wait time to formulate their responses. The teacher can introduce the technique either before or after posing the question.

2. Following the wait time, the teacher asks a random student for a response.

3. When further questions are asked in the session, the teacher reminds the students that there should be 'no hands up' and that they may be asked for a response at any time.

Tips for using the technique successfully:

• warn students that this is a 'no hands up' session
• establish a friendly, supportive, non-judgemental atmosphere using positive body language and reaffirming phrases
• remind students to listen to what other students have said as they may have to adjust their response accordingly
• praise students for active listening, for making a contribution and for respecting the contributions made by others
• differentiate questions to give students the best chance of a positive outcome

Giving students 'wait time' has been shown to significantly improve the quality of their responses.

Brainstorming

This is a useful interactive teaching technique that allows all participants to make a contribution without fear of judgement from others.

Here are the steps:

1. Students listen to a question posed by the teacher - this should be open-ended with no specific right answer in order to generate a range of ideas
2. Students offer their ideas when the teacher asks them one by one - it is not necessary for students to raise their hands as everyone is encouraged to make a contribution
3. All ideas are recorded by the teacher where everyone can see them

After the brainstorm session the ideas can be further processed in line with the plan for the rest of the lesson.

Tips for using the technique successfully:

• establish a friendly, supportive, non-judgemental atmosphere for brainstorming
• remind students to listen to what other students have said to make sure that they don't repeat any replies
• try to keep the activity pacy, adapting the length of the brainstorm session to match the flow of ideas
• praise students for active listening and for respecting the contributions made by others
• the technique works well at the beginning of a new topic as a way of finding out students' prior knowledge

Cumulative talk

Cumulative talk is co operative talk and can lead to knowledge construction through the sharing of ideas. It is limited from an educational point of view in that it does not produce critically grounded knowledge. Its real value is that it promotes group/whole class harmony whilst allowing ground rules for the more meaningful exploratory talk to become established. It also has the added benefit of allowing pupils to increase in confidence as they speak without being challenged at first.

Cumulative talk is talk in which…

• Everyone simply accepts and agrees with what other people say.
• Children do use talk to share knowledge, but they do so in an uncritical way.
• Children repeat and elaborate each other's ideas, but they don't evaluate them carefully.

The following document outlines the three types of talk that children are mostly engaged with in the classroom and provides examples:Three kinds of talk.

Magic microphone

This is a useful technique to encourage students to speak out in the classroom. The teacher poses a question for the students to think about before initiating the use of a prop which is passed around the room. The prop is a tool that the students can use independently to make talk equitable. It could be any small item such as a ball or a bean bag that can be easily passed from one student to another. The student who is holding the prop has permission to speak. When they have finished speaking they then pass the 'magic microphone' on to another willing participant.

Here are the steps:

1. Students listen to a question or a discussion point and are given wait time to formulate their responses. The teacher can introduce the technique either before or after posing the question.

2. Following the wait time, the prop is passed to a student who is willing to say out loud what their response is to the question.

3. The prop (or 'magic microphone') is then passed around the room from student to student with all students who get the prop speaking their responses out loud. A student who does not wish to speak simply passes the prop on to another who does.

Tips for using the technique successfully:

• establish a friendly, supportive, non-judgemental atmosphere using positive body language and reaffirming phrases
• remind students to listen to what other students have said as they may have to adjust their response accordingly
• try to keep the activity pacy, encouraging students to quickly pass the prop between themselves
• praise students for active listening, for making a contribution and for respecting the contributions made by others
• manage the movement of the 'magic microphone' and draw together points from the talk/discussion, paraphrasing them if necessary

Think-Pair-Share

This technique encourages cooperative learning by peer interactivity. Teachers should cue the progress from one step to the next. In the primary classroom, hand signals for each step can be developed with the students and these can be used along with verbal cues.

Here are the steps:

1. Think - Students listen to a question (this may be an open-ended question to which there are many answers) or a presentation and are given ‘think time’ to formulate their responses.
2. Pair - Following the ‘think time’, students work together with a partner, sharing ideas, discussing, clarifying and challenging.
3. Share -The pair then share their ideas with another pair, or with the whole class. Students should be prepared to share their partner’s ideas as well as their own.

Allowing students time to think, sometimes referred to as 'wait time' has been shown by researchers to improve the quality of their responses. Talking through ideas with a partner first before sharing them with a wider audience allows for those ideas to be elaborated on and refined.

Horseshoe seating arrangement

Blue horseshoe

This seating arrangement, where students sit with or without their chairs in the shape of a horseshoe (like the dots in the horseshoe picture) is best used during whole class dialogue for example during cumulative talk. It creates a more 'intimate' classroom environment that helps to provide students with the security they need to take risks with their talk. Everyone can see each other easily and this encourages peer co-operativity. Teachers can stand outside the horseshoe and guide the activity from there or they can join in with the seating arrangement and be an equal contributor. Ideally the open part of the horseshoe would be orientated towards the board if the teacher (or the students) are intending to write anything on the board during the activity.

You may need to experiment a number of times before you find the best way of arranging the desks and/or chairs. Desks would not be needed for a cumulative talk activity but they may be needed if the activity chosen involves students writing . Younger children may be happy to sit in a horseshoe arrangement on the floor and a space can be cleared by pushing the desks and chairs to the sides of the classroom.

Tips for using this arrangement:

• make sure you have tried the arrangement out first before trying it with students and decide on the best orientation
• give simple straight-forward instructions as to how the students should move their desks and/or chairs into the arrangement
• explain to students that you are using this seating arrangement as it will make it easier for everyone to see each other and contribute equally
• encourage students to glance around the horse shoe shape as they speak, addressing their comments to the whole group
• factor in time to both set up and dismantle the horseshoe arrangement- the time taken to do this should decrease as the students become more familiar with the layout and move around the room more efficiently

Traffic lights

Traffic lights, also known as robots in southern Africa (or elsewhere as traffic signals, traffic lamps, signal lights, or semaphores), are a useful resource, consisting of three different coloured cards, for everyday use in classrooms in order to assess.

The name "traffic lights" comes from the fact that traffic lights (or robots) are a piece of equipment designed to control traffic flow. Traffic lights have three lights - red, orange and green. These lights signal to drivers what action they should take on the road with each coloured light having a different meaning associated with it: Red means Stop; Orange means Get Ready and Green means Go.

In education, "traffic lights / robots" refers to a set of coloured cards in the classroom, where the colours have meaning as follows:

• a RED card means “I’m stuck. I need some extra help. I don’t feel I have progressed.”
• an ORANGE card means “I’m not quite sure. I need a little help. I feel I have made some progress.”
• a GREEN card means “I understand fully. I’m okay without help. I feel I have progressed a lot.”

Use of robots / traffic lights in the classroom:

• While the teachers are teaching, they can ask students to hold up a coloured card to assess if they should proceed to the next topic or not.
• Students can voluntarily show a coloured card indicating their current level of understanding. They can change the coloured card several times during a single lesson. In this way, the student can bring their understanding to the teacher's notice without disturbing other classmates or the flow of the lesson. Teachers can address the student at an appropriate time.
• While working independently in groups, students can display their coloured card on the table to indicate their current status. Teachers can visit the student to provide assistance.

Eventually students are expected to independently use the coloured cards without the teacher's instruction to do so. The coloured cards of the robot^(a)/traffic lights^(a) should become a silent way of communicating in the class.

Displaying cards also reduce students' physical stress of standing in queues or raising their hands while waiting for the teacher's attention.

What to call robots / traffic lights in the classroom. Bear in mind that students at deep rural schools may have never seen a robot, and may not be familiar with the concept. Also, the name might vary: In Europe, robots are known as traffic lights whilst in Southern Africa they are commonly referred to as robots. Use the name that will be most familiar to the students in your classroom and explain the concept of the coloured lights and their meaning if necessary.

Use of robots / traffic lights in groupwork: While the teacher needs to know who has understood, it doesn't have to always be the teacher who responds to red or orange cards. Students working in a group can also help each other. In Unit 3 we emphasise that groupwork is most successful when groups themselves are given responsibility for making sure that all members understand. Robot / traffic lights cards can alert students to the need to assist their peers.

One Zambian teacher's reflection on trying out the technique:

During interactive teaching and learning, pupils in groups work very hard through collaboration in order to get correct answers and display green cards.

The traffic lights activity worked very well because it made me as a teacher to know whether my teaching was understood or not by seeing the most colour of cards which were displayed. If most of them displayed green then I concluded that teaching and learning took place. If most of displayed red cards, again I could tell that proper learning hasn’t taken place. I thought of using other approach methods to achieve the objectives of learning and teaching i.e. I could emphasis more during conclusion and give home work or give remedial work sometimes as peer assessment.

Suggested follow-up activity: Do the activity of making robot / traffic lights cards with your students.You can be creative about the use of materials depending on availability.