“It is amazing how little you need to be happy.”
–Gilda at Traveller Interrupted 

Dr Spencer Kagan is a renowned educator who changed the way the world viewed teaching.  He is mainly known for his work on cooperative learning strategies (often referred to as Kagan learning structures).

Instead of didactic teaching, in which a teacher stands at the front and tells information to whole class, Kagan thought that there were more effective methods.

Watch this excellent video clip, for a useful overview of the Kagan approach:

By adopting Kagan’s approach, research has shown that it greatly improves:

• Team-building
• Social skills
• Communication skills
• Knowledge building
• Decision making
• Processing information
• Thinking skills
• Presenting information

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Below are my favourite cooperative learning strategies:

Some others I have used are:

• Pairs Squared (pair the learners, then pair up the pairs!)
• Show not tell (pupils have to use drawings and diagrams to explain an answer)
• Swapsies (pairs work on problems individually – they swap every minute to help solve or check…

Classroom presentations come with many challenges–not the least of which is keeping your students engaged long enough to teach the lesson! New technology creates many opportunities to spruce up your presentations and keep students captivated, so the trick is simply to figure out which methods will work best for you. 

In this article, I will explain three ways to make classroom presentations more engaging for students of all ages. Be sure to remember that you can always make tweaks to these ideas to fit the individual needs of your classroom. Great presentations come from understanding your audience.

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Stop Motion Videos

Stop motion videos are a fun way to incorporate movement into your presentations. You can find a short video online, or create your own! Stop motion videos are typically made by shooting photos of a scene, making small changes to the scene between photos, and then stitching these photos…