At Lincoln Elementary School where I taught for years, we were fortunate to have Holistic Life Foundation founders Atman, Ali, and Andy, spend a week with us to support our school improvement plan's goal around Positive Behavior Support.
Holistic Life Foundation has been teaching kids in their after-school program in Baltimore for more than a decade and has had amazing results. Their goal is to teach the teachers. As you can see in their TED talk they value the students' ability to lead practices.
While HLF is in the school for the week, they teach the kids a new exercise a day, then the next day they have the student lead the class with their support. You know, that good gradual release of responsibility stuff, we teachers do it all the time. After the week was over, I wanted to continue the practices and continue having students lead them, so I created student prompt sheets for my students to use as they lead the practices.
This got me thinking about flipping the classroom. If you have not heard of this idea I really like Mary Beth Hertz’s explanation on Edutopia . The idea is that students watch their lectures as homework and then practice their new learning in the classroom. This allows the teacher to use his/her expertise to guide the students through their work and for students to work together.
A teacher could assign the exercise to a student and he/she could lead that exercise the next day in class. This meets Common Core State Standards:
- CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.3.6 Speak in complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation in order to provide requested detail or clarification. (See grade 3 Language standards 1 and 3 here for specific expectations.)
- CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.4 Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.
- CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.5.4 Report on a topic or text or present an opinion, sequencing ideas logically and using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.
Another benefit is that it increases the class's sense of community.
If you would like the Holistic Life Foundation, Inc. to visit your school, contact them at info@hlfinc.org.
