Teach Secondary Issue 14.3

effective way of checking for understanding and misconceptions, while also helping to identify any material that may perhaps need to be retaught. [SLT] Says A final movement game that always creates great excitement among KS3 students (and sometimes even KS4 students claiming to be too old for it). It’s a version of ‘Simon Says’, rebadged as whatever the name of your headteacher or other member of SLT says. Place a picture of the senior colleague in question on a PowerPoint slide, alongside a superimposed speech bubble containing an instruction. You’ll need to create several of these with different instructions for each round. Play then proceeds as follows: “ Ms/Mr [name] says… ‘Put your hands on your head if you can tell me when the Battle of Hastings took place.’ ” As the teacher, you can now confidently ask any student with their hands placed on their head to tell you the answer. This is another useful strategy to check for understanding, but students need to feel confident to not put their hands on their head and admit they ‘ can’t tell you. ’ You can come up with your own imaginative instructions for successive rounds. I always like to end with “ Laugh out loud if you can tell me… ” – which is particularly good if the head or a member of SLT happen to be walking by with a prospective new parent, and witness you and the class all laughing together... Take it further Beyond these, there are many other games you could include in lessons to help develop students’ literacy and retrieval skills. Examples can range from reliable favourites, like Scrabble, Bingo, Scattergories and Dominos, through toWord Clouds and learning apps that combine key vocabulary with images. Image-based games are great for ensuring accessibility. These can include quick ‘Odd One Out’ activities, or filling a slide with images that relate to previous learning, before secretly removing them one at a time, and tasking students with spotting which are missing and explaining how the image links back to something they’ve covered in a previous lesson. Love them or hate them, emojis are now a staple part of how students communicate with each other, so using them in a lesson activity can be an easy win. Provide students with printouts showing a variety of emojis that they must annotate and link back to an aspect of their learning. I’m frequently amazed at how often they’re able to make relevant links I’d never have thought of myself. Multiple choice questions continue to be a reliable activity when it comes to retrieval practice, so try getting students to devise multiple-choice quizzes of their own. One approach you could try involves students attempting to ‘outfox’ each other. Have the students form pairs, and give each pair a different question related to their learning. Each pair must then come up with four plausible answers to their question, only one of which is correct. If they can outfox the rest of the class with their convincing false options, they get a point. If their opponents get the question right, they get the point – another potentially useful strategy for identifying misconceptions. Firmfavourites My advice for anyone wanting to incorporate games into their lessons is always ensure that they’re based on retrieval of prior learning, since this will help to both identify misconceptions and inform your future planning. Be sure to keep things simple, and stick to games with streamlined rules that don’t require lots of resources and extra equipment. Don’t be afraid to play the same games with both KS3 and KS4 learners, as students’ familiarity with the games’ rules and how they work can save valuable time later on. Moreover, ABOUT THE AUTHOR Deborah Hayden is a head of history TIPS ON GAMEPLAY Utilise different game types that variously focus on movement, literacy and oracy skills, and the students’ ability to identify visual clues To keep things organised, I’d recommend using PowerPoint templates to assemble your game displays and questions – see tiny.cc/ts143-HG1 for some examples Designate a ‘Game of the week’, whereby all of your classes across different year groups will play the same game. This will let you make any necessary tweaks for subsequent classes. Study TV game shows for possible ideas – Richard Osman’s House of Games can be a great source of inspiration. you’ll soon identify those firm favourites that can be used as ‘carrots’ to win over more challenging classes. Remember – learning should always be meaningful, but that’s not to say that it can’t also be fun… 67 teachwire.net/secondary H I S TO R Y