Thursday, November 15, 2012

Tuesday Teaching Strategy - Gallery Walk

Gallery Walk is a teaching strategy that involves the movement of students around the room to a collection of displays that are connected to the day’s activities. A gallery walk can have several different purposes and is a good way to evaluate what students know about a topic before OR after it is taught.
The aspects of a Gallery walk can be anything from open-ended questions about the subject for the day, artwork related to central themes, photographs depicting aspects of curriculum, illustrations, or even demonstrations showing step by step procedures.
Gallery Walks are often completed with students participating in partners or small groups. In a given amount of time, each group will visit each display. As students read, observe, and interact with the display, they take notes on what they discover. Students can be provided guided notes or just require them to write notes as they go. When time is up, students take time reflecting on what they discovered. It is important that the teacher walk around and monitor students’ engagement with this activity.
Gallery walks can promote even more meaningful assessment when students post their notes around the displays encouraging students to think deeper and further than the notes posted previously. Then as students go around, responses can be to the original prompt and to the other students’ notes.
Implementation Ideas
- English can take parts of a poem, short story, or text and encourage students to discuss symbolism, identify parts of speech, and discuss meanings.
- Social Studies can use the activity to address various political cartoons or examine images from historical periods and gather students’ thoughts.
- Government students can use this to decide whether something is constitutional or unconstitutional and have students explain why.
- Mathematics teachers can provide images of Geometric figures and discuss the various concepts that are covered. Students could solve a problem and then write a problem for the next group to solve.
- Science teachers could use the activity related to outcomes of experiments
- PE and Health teachers could use the activity as a way for students to share a game they create and other students could comment and add to them
- Arts and Humanities teachers could use this strategy to examine art or even share student created projects

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