Teaching Post 4-Elisabeth

6. Balancing Instruction and Activity
Jr. High students are squirrely. I really don’t know how else to put it. It is difficult to get them to listen to verbal instruction for any length of time. The best way we found was to stagger activity and instruction. On our first and second days, there was a lot of verbal instruction, because of some unforseem problems. By the time we got to the end, kids were practically bouncing out of their seats. But once we got them on their feet and doing things, they were ok. They were able to focus (mostly) when we finished the activity and discussed it. Another thing I noticed is that modeling as well as giving verbal instructions keeps students more engaged, and makes it more clear what you are expecting. Once concern that I had was the amount of activity compared to instruction. We had a lot of activity, but I was unsure if it was clear from the verbal instruction why we were doing all of the activities.