I'm trying a completely new approach: team-based learning.
The class is divided into 7 groups. Each group is graded by group points.
This means students are both rewarded and penalized for their peers' ability.
The point of the whole thing is to encourage stronger students to help weaker ones - there's after all an enormous difference in skill levels.
Plus this year all first year classes are single sex. I had a boys class today. There was actually something nice about having a lot of stragglers in one class -the boys are almost always the lowest achieving language students- but definitely a lot of challenges. I actually had to discipline a bit, take away group points.
The class is always structured in a learning/exploratory portion with a "numbered heads" quiz at the end: every student in all the groups has a number and I call on that number, quizzing orally. The students have to be quick or I pass them over.
This method of quizzing is short and sweet, but it's hard to be fair about how much time I'll allow students to answer during quiz time or who to call on (usually I tell myself I'll call all number threes and fives today or something like that).
I've also been trying to incorporate more TPR into my class. I saw a great video on using warm ups in class on Genki-English. Great site for elementary school. Do I dare try songs in my class too?
