Carousel lessons

Maximising time and promoting individual learning paths.

Photo by Yunus Emre on Unsplash

Thoughts and musings

When planning, delivering and reflecting on a lesson, it never fails to surprise me how the pocket of time the learning experience is encapsulated in just seems to fly by. Multiply this by the number of lessons in a day, a week, a term and beyond! Therefore, I have always been an advocate of finding ways to maximise time within a lesson. The idea of a carousel lesson structure was fervently promoted at the beginning of my career as an educator. The guided reading session appeared to have adopted a merry-go-round structure for the completion of different activities over the course of a week and it was clear how the deliberate planning of specified tasks allowed for varied experience. Alongside guided reading, I could see the benefits of lifting this approach and applying it to grammar activities. At this stage, the idea presented itself as having multiple tasks for children to physically move around the classroom to complete. The active learning element was there, the tasks felt fresh although perhaps a bit saturated and I would often give my colleagues a headache with the intricacies of organisation, resourcing and facilitation.

Fast forwards 10 years. Experience, reflection and collaboration moulded the variety and intent of the carousel lessons of the past into the purposeful SPaG activities referred to in my previous post. Part of what makes the carousel lesson an excellent vehicle for organising and delivering carefully crafted experiences is its ability to be individualised for the learners. Building on the concept of ensuring that pupils’ writing journeys are tailored to their needs (“painting by numbers”), a carousel lesson allows for SPaG teaching and learning opportunities to be precise, motivating and to promote student autonomy.

Ideas and practical suggestions

So, how can carousel lessons promote the curation and delivery of purposeful and individualised SPaG learning experiences? Below are two suggestions which I hope could be actioned with minimal time spent preparing. Think of these more as a shift towards intentionality when designing and organising the content of SPaG objectives in your writing cycle.

1. Organising the learning pathways

Picking up from my previous post (discussing how to identify the most purposeful SPaG objectives for the stage that the pupils are at in the development of their writing journey) the next step would be to organise the carefully designed activities. If you can work your timetable to have a longer time slot for a carousel, it is beneficial to give ample time to allow for task completion. This may mean that you are accounting for two lessons of content sandwiched together in a double-slot. As shared earlier, as much as I used to love the buzz of a carousel lesson packed to the rafters with content and movement at the beginning of my career, the following approach has proved more effective for learning outcomes (and less likely to inflict the need to have a lie down in a darkened room at the end of the session).

• Top tips for task organisation:

  • Ensure you understand the needs of the SPaG groups in your classroom. As previously suggested, a maximum of 4 groups feels manageable. This means that you will have a maximum of 4 learning pathways to plan for (which is why you may want to double-up two lesson slots).

  • The carousel analogy more applies to the adults movement rather than the pupils. The learning pathways will guide children through the different activities to explore, develop and secure their understanding of the SPaG objective (see more below) but it is more the educators’ time which needs to be flexible and intentional. For example, do you have a group that need some pre-teaching, consolidation or perhaps a more active, game-based warm-up as task one? They may start their learning outside with a Learning Assistant. Do you have groups that need some directed teaching or perhaps need to move forward from a previously identified misconception? They may begin with a teacher-led session. Are your greater depth writers ready to have a go on their own and then conference with the teacher about their writing choices? They will have a teacher-check in half way through the lesson. Timings and facilitator approaches can be flexible. A suggested carousel route for the adults in the classroom may look like this:

2. Designing the content

A SPaG carousel could feel like a daunting task to create, particularly if you do have 4 different objectives to create 4 different learning pathways for. However, resourcing does not have to be burdensome and the activities will not always have a recorded outcome. The idea of immersion in the SPaG skill is important here and allowing for different methods for exploring the objective to be maximised. As suggested on the carousel route above, there may be 3 different activities to be completed on each learning pathway. I will always be grateful for the dynamic and creative practitioners I have worked with and it was through some experimenting and connection building that we forged a link between the SPaG carousel and two of the aims in the national curriculum for mathematics:

• Fluency

• Reasoning

We found that we could build activities that would allow pupils to develop their raw understanding of the skill (the fluency) and also increase their ability to justify the use of the skill in context and evaluate the effectiveness of it on the reader (reasoning).

Below are some ideas for types of activities that may be included in the learning pathways:

• Fluency

  • Usually the first task in the learning pathway, fluency is where pupils explore, experiment and play with the SPaG skill.

  • Games are a great way to warm-up the skill. These may be in the form of matching activities, spot the difference, team games and word play. My go-to for creative ideas has always been Pie Corbett and Juliet Strong’s ‘Jumpstart! Grammar’ series (linked below).

  • Music is another approach to engage learners on a different level. I have always loved MC Grammar’s catchy, whilst also being highly educational, songs and raps and will look for any possible way to include these in my SPaG teaching experiences. I have often heard children quietly singing lines back to themselves whilst in the depths of their writing.

  • Fluency activities are also the perfect time for pupils to practise the skill in isolation. Opportunities for gap-fill tasks, creating revision cards or posters and ‘correcting’ misconceptions work well here. These tasks should be straight-forward to plan and easily give you the information that you need as to whether the skill has been secured or what future teaching may be needed. To ensure that these tasks create a meaningful resource for future writing experiences (think ‘writer’s journal’) I would always recommend tailoring these tasks to the genre/theme you are warming the skills up for rather than finding a generic activity.

• Reasoning

  • When the children appear to be mostly fluent in the SPaG skill they can move to a more evaluative approach. When they are reasoning about the skill in action they are thinking more critically and assessing its accuracy and impact in action.

  • Sentence stems are helpful to structure thinking and will focus on considering how the skill has been deployed and in some cases what may make this more effective.

  • Children often love to ‘be the teacher’ so giving them the role of the expert encourages them to think carefully about the evaluation that they are providing.

An example may be:

Miss Spargo has used the adverb ‘carefully’ in the sentence below:

‘The stunt artist carefully jumped from a tall building across a deep, treacherous river.’

Do you think that this is the most effective adverb to use? Explain your reasoning.

Would you have chosen a different adverb? If so, which one? Why would you have chosen this?