Summary
Have you ever been bored to tears watching as student groups endlessly present projects? Even the most exciting, most differentiated projects get boring after a while. Everyone else is just sitting and watching, and often zoning out, while other groups present. After all these years of teaching, I came up with what I think is a brilliant idea: the Gallery Walk. Instead of having a group present one at a time while everyone else watches, I proposed a convention-style series of presentations and called it a Gallery Walk.
The benefit to this was that everyone is engaged throughout the entire time. Every student was either actively presenting or actively responding. The students responding to the presentation really paid attention throughout the entire Gallery Walk. In addition, there were a number of projects in very different formats (for example, there were all sorts of different types of responses to the short story “The Fun They Had” as students could choose, and there were a variety of summer project types.) This method of presenting allowed all of these projects to be presented within the allotted time period. Had we done this in a more old-fashioned approach, substantially more class time would have been used.
TIPC Ratings
Students did not complete much research in this lesson. This was a lesson I did the first nine weeks of school, and students were introduced to a variety of technology applications. They were then given the choice of which to use when responding to the short story “The Fun They Had” and when creating the presentation of their Two-Tone Poem.
Students communicated and collaborated to organize the Gallery Walk. They identified jobs and enlisted support. Several students in each class stepped up to leadership roles and loved the idea of acting as the chairpersons of the event.
At the beginning of the year, students were beginning to learn about the different technology approaches available to them. They had options and were excited to learn and use different technological applications while completing the projects that they presented in the Gallery Walk.
Again, since this lesson was at the beginning of the year, much of the creativity and innovation is in the developing stage and is seen as students become inspired by the technology or by the actual Gallery Walk event itself (such as when the student made her own banner with poster board and recycling cans.)
Student Artifact
Download Files
- Lesson Plan
- Student Samples
- Discussion Board Samples
- Example Response Forms
