Dear colleague,
Today, let's look at a Valued Within exercise that we can do via one of my favorite instructional activities: Pop-Up Debates.
As you'll recall, Valued Within exercises are any activity that has students figuring out why the work of learning is valuable to them. Unlike Mini-Sermons, in which creating and communicating Value messages are my responsibility, Valued Within exercises place that responsibility where it must ultimately reside: in the hearts of students.
While I've treated Valued Within exercises elsewhere on the blog this school year (e.g., the utility-value “t-chart” intervention, Why Conversations, “mathy moments,” the argument game), today I want to focus on one that is very simple once you've got Pop-Up Debates going in your classroom.
At the end of a learning progression (week, unit, semester, etc.), this is the prompt template you use: What was the most interesting thing you learned in this unit?
Variations by subject area could include:
- What's the most interesting song we sang in choir this semester?
- What's the most interesting concept we learned about in science this month?
- Who is the most interesting character in the book or play we read?
- What's the most interesting type of problem we learned to solve in math this unit?
You get the idea.
Do you see the sneaky assumption within these prompts? THIS CLASS IS ACTUALLY INTERESTING! But instead of sermonizing my students on this, I'm pointing their minds toward it by having them interpret course material through the lens of interest.
Like always, before I have students share their answers during the Pop-Up Debate, I have them first write their answers out. Often times, I'll have them write about their top two or top three.
If we stopped here with just the writing part, we'd still be getting some good things happening:
- Students have to think back on what they've been studying and evaluate the interestingness of things. This gets them thinking about the meaning of the things they've learned about, which is a great boon to retention and understanding of the course material. Any time you get students thinking about meaning, that's some deep work you're paving the way for. (Video on that idea of thinking about meaning here.)
- Students will all produce one to three things they've learned recently that are at least 1% interesting. That's a win.
But when we actually have students respond to this prompt in a Pop-Up Debate, now we're getting a LOT of bang for the buck.
- Students are articulating to their peers something they found interesting and explaining why they find it interesting.
- Students are hearing ALL of their classmates articulate what they found interesting, and maybe even ARGUING with one another about which things are most interesting.
- By the end, students have reviewed all kinds of content, thought about all kinds of meaning, and heard all of their peers argue from the assumption that there actually are interesting things we've learned about in this unit.
In the '23-'24 school year, this prompt is probably my favorite discovery out of all the things I tried with students. Here are some of the ways I modified it:
There's a lot of fun to be had with this one, colleague.
So go have some fun.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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