OER4Schools/Talking points and effective group work/review of follow up

• In the last session, you planned Talking Points about a topic. Did you try teaching through the talking points during this week? If yes, how did your pupils respond to the talking points? Share your experience about as many points given below:

• Which activity did you use for team building?
• How did you get everybody to participate?
• Were students able to explain their reasoning and understanding to peers?
• Were there ‘free riders’ or individuals dominating the discussion? How did you address this?

• Will you plan Talking Points activity again for your pupils? What changes will you make to the points for this activity, so that they are more effective for group discussion? Some of the things that you can think about, are: number of correct/incorrect/unsure statements, wording of statements, length of statements, concrete and abstract statements.

• Did you recruit any older students as Classroom Assistants this week? For which teaching activity were they recruited? Did you use any criteria for choosing them? What is your assessment of their usefulness for achieving lesson objectives? What is the impact on the learning of the classroom assistants by carrying out this role? Discuss any issues that you faced in recruiting or by recruiting classroom assistants. Remember: it is very important that classroom assistants are recruited with full cooperation of the students, their parents, teachers and the school administration. It needs to be a voluntary activity.

• Did you download or try to download images that could be used with the Talking Points? Share any technology issues that you faced while downloading. Also describe the steps if you were able to resolve them. Otherwise, discuss unresolved issues with your peers for ideas on how they can be resolved.

• While downloading images for Talking Points, did you face any conceptual issues such as availability of images related to the teaching concept or choosing images that were relevant? Did using images improve the effectiveness of Talking Points? Give examples to support your response.