Kagan's practical training provides teachers with a new shared lens to view their current practice & provides alternatives & additions to their teaching kete to ensure full engagement, equity & excellence.

Consider this…

Anytime teachers want students to: discuss, share, analyse, question, compare, find, justify, quiz, evaluate, explain, describe, present, solve, collaborate, build etc, they can use a Kagan Structure to ensure full engagement, high levels of oral language, and respect for others points of view.

How would that look in a standard classroom setting?

Let’s say you’re reading a picture book or novel to the class. Before you start reading, you could show the front cover or give the title, and ask the class a question about what they know already, or similar. At this stage, students would raise a hand and you would choose one to share their answer, then another and so on. Does this look familiar?

With this instructional strategy, Call on One or Whole Class Question Answer:

• Who answers?

• Are they usually priority students?

• Is it safe?

• How many students get to share?

• Is there any student to student interaction?

• Can students hide?

• Does it develop social skills?

Or you could use a Kagan Structure, such as RallyRobin, to have the students make a verbal list with their partner around what they know about that topic, or things they think might occur in the story. If it’s not the first time with the text, you could ask them to list what they remember from last time you read it. Once you start reading you could stop and ask them to RallyRobin with their partner: words to describe the main character or the setting, or list everything that has happened so far.

This time when we ask the same questions, we get a very different answer:

With this instructional strategy, RallyRobin…

• Who answers?

• Are they usually priority students?

• Is it safe?

• How many students get to share?

• Is there any student to student interaction?

• Can students hide?

• Does it develop social skills?

It doesn’t start and end there though. Details that need to be managed are: how and who are they partnered with - student selected, random sitting, random standing, team table partners (teacher selected); social skills - greeting, active listening, taking turns, body language, what praise or response for their partner at the end of the sharing time, using names etc; checking in - no volunteers. You know everyone has shared so you can now safely ask any student to share what their partner said, versus volunteers, as in Call on One.

So by replacing ‘hand up’ with one simple Kagan structure, teachers can ensure full engagement, develop social & communication skills, and create equity.

We talk about a new shared lens because Kagan’s core principles provide schools with a definition for engagement, which applies to all levels, topics and contexts. Using some of the questions from above, teachers can now look at their practice through a different set of eyes, and make instant changes to increase engagement and equity.

This is a very simplistic explanation and if you’d like to know more, or have us model this with your students to show how ‘simple’ it is, please feel free to contact us.