Five Strategies To Help Teachers Revive Reviews

Is review time a big bore for your students? Add a little fun to this exercise with strategies that will spice up things, revive interest, and ensure retention!

Teachers face a variety of challenges on a day-to-day basis, but perhaps their biggest challenge is helping students retain what they learn. One way to ensure this is by finding more innovative, engaging ways to teach and review while facilitating active student participation in topics that might not be the most fun to learn. And like most of us, students are enthusiastically engaged game-like tasks that are unexpected, include various rewards, foster a safe level of competition, or promote positive and cooperative social interactions.

Following are some creative reviewing strategies that should prove helpful, and even fun, no matter the grade level or content area in which you teach. These will also encourage cooperation and teamwork, and the intermediate learning will provide extra support for those students whose parents might not have time to help them study at home.

1. Turn The Tables, Students Turn Teachers

The key is to allow students to do the instructing. Assign one topic to a single student, a pair or a group. Set the standards for the presentation, such as the requirement of a visual or a prop. While this activity allows for review of the instructor, at the same time it allows the remaining students, who are also the audience, to take notes on all of the assigned topics. Additionally, provide anonymous student essays and put students to grade these. Allowing students an opportunity to assess other’s work can give them an idea of what works and what doesn’t work especially in writing.

2. Go On A Scavenger hunt

For this activity, the teacher needs to create a list of review topics. After topics are assigned, individual students are directed to their books and notes to seek answers. This review strategy allows for assessing the learning of each student and also helps to teach the value of keeping good notes. An alternative would be to allow students to partner up or work in teams to seek answers and later discuss with the entire class to share knowledge.

3. Tic-Tac-Toe, What do you know?

This activity can be used with the whole class, but works best with small groups. You need two groups and each group is assigned either X or O. Draw the a tic-tac-toe board on paper or the board. Students earn the ability to place their X or O marker on the game board if they answer a teacher-read the question correctly. The winning team is declared on the basis of maximum credits.

4. Pictionary, Imagine The World

Just like students love the game show concept, they would never turn down a chance to write on the board. Write a topic, concept or vocabulary word on an index card. Each student gets to draw a card, and then has 15 seconds to think about the word/topic before they draw it. Students work as teams to draw hints on the board without the use of spoken or written words. The team who guesses correctly earns one point for their team.

5. Review with Flash Cards

Portable and easy to use, flash cards are a simple and effective way to study. These can be created for any important vocabulary, terms, or topics and students can use these for a self-quiz, or to challenge a partner. Also, get creative and ask students to devise pictures or symbols to help them remember the given term or topic.

Remember, review for a test doesn’t have to be boring. Any of the above ideas can be manipulated to work with different class sizes, content areas and grade levels. Teachers may choose to use a review activity for fun or give students credit for correct answers and participation. Also, to make these review strategies more effective, teachers can sometimes have the students create the questions themselves. This requires them to reflect upon what they have learned in the class and determine the important things they think they should know.

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