Activity Centers for a more meaningful engagement

I am an IB MYP Year 1 (Grade 6) to MYP Year 5 (Grade 10) Individuals and Societies teacher. And in my experience, my students have gained more from a learning engagement where they have been able to experience a content first-hand. Learning or activity centers are a great way to get your students engage with a concept or topic more meaningfully.

Hilber et al. (2003) emphasize that “activity centers allow teachers to responsively instruct and assist small groups… The outcome of activity centers in the development of the values necessary for a successful classroom community- fairness, harmony, inclusion, and academic excellence. (Hilberg et al. 2003, p.1). The authors further emphasize that the “activity centers tasks encourage active collaboration, participation, and opportunities for extended reading, writing and speaking to promote the development of everyday and academic language”(2003, p.2). IB stresses on Approaches to Learning (ATL) as an important component of teaching inquiry. Individuals and Societies involves critical thinking and honing communication skills. Students engage with sources of information to deduce an argument. And these can be made possible through activity centers. These centers can be divided into a vocabulary center, reading center, source analysis center, Media center, and an argument center. The division of the centers can change with the nature of the task or units. 

In a unit on World War with Grade 9, I decided to divide the class into various activity centers. The centers were divided into Vocabulary center for students to engage with vocabulary games related to World War, Primary sources center entailing newspaper clippings, diaries, video clips, etc related to the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austro- Hungary and Italy) and the Triple Entente (France, Great Britain, and Russia), secondary sources center with the historiographies and the last center was a World War board game for students to solve answers to the questions asked. Although I have used activity centers rarely, I do plan to use them more often. As the learning moved online due to the pandemic, I tried to replicate the same via Zoom breakout rooms and assigning the students their respective folders with the tasks. The possibility of using virtual tours makes it unusually fascinating for the students to engage with the learning more deeply.

“Learning centers are a valuable instructional strategy to build literacy skills and content knowledge with differentiated instructional support (Doyle, 2011 in Mcknight, 2014 p. 131). In my classroom, activity centers ensure differentiation of instructions where both learners of English as an additional language and extended learners can benefit. “Activity centers provide the context for a teaching transformation” (Hilberg et al. 2003, p.2) and I believe in that because, unlike traditional instructions, activity centers allow students to be responsible for their learning.

Needless to say, my students remember this activity and others similar to these more than any lecture styled classes. Learning makes more meaning when the learner is able to experience it first hand. So go on teachers and ideate to make the learning experience more rich.

References

Hilberg, R.S., Chang, J., & Epaloosse, G. (2003). Designing effective activity centers for diverse learners: A guide for teachers at all grade levels and for all subject areas. Retrieved September 28, 2020 from http://manoa.hawaii.edu/coe/crede/wp-content/uploads/Hilberg_et_al_20031.pdf McKnight, K.S. (2014). Common core literacy strategies for ELA, history/social studies, and the humanities, grades 6-12: Strategies to deepen content knowledge (grades 6-12). John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.