Student engagement

We have been struggling to keep all the children engaged in whole class discussions when all 50ish children are on the mat. At the start of the term I did a couple of time samples on children on/off task and found that over the space of a 15 minute modeling session almost all the children were off task at one point or another. This made me think about how much teacher-talk we do compared to how much thinking and talking the children do. I use think-pair-share quite often, especially in writing before sending the children off to write independently. I would like to expand my use of these style of strategies to promote more child engagement in whole class sessions. So far I have tried:

- Think-pair-share

- Staggered brainstorming (pairs, then 4s, then 8s)

- Sharing writing work with a buddy/two buddies at the end of a session instead of all the children sitting listening to one person

- Divided tasks e.g. write on half the whiteboard each - swap

These have all be quite good at engaging children to promote discussion and ideas. The next things I would like to work on is the engagement between these times and the noise level when sharing ideas! I am going to trial giving the children a shorter 'brain break' run between 9-10am before fitness at 10ish to see if this helps them to concentrate on literacy for longer. Perhaps we need to do something similar at 2.15? I used to do this a lot in my single-cell room but it has got lost when trying new things with collaboration.