Silent Reflection

For my silence activity, I borrowed an idea from the presentation and had students complete a silent gallery walk. We are studying "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens" in public speaking. For one of the chapters, I created questions based on the reading students had completed the night before. Each student was given a marker and instructed to circle the room and answer the questions quietly on chart paper. It's never an easy feat to keep teenagers from talking the entire writing period, but they did pretty well. I made sure to include around 10 questions so there would be a variety of questions and to keep students from crowding around one question. As facilitator, I clarified questions and kept students moving. After all students had answered, I distributed the chart paper to different students and we discussed the answers provided as a whole group. I found this activity was a great way for students to all have input on questions and it didn't take a lot of time to do. The responses on the papers gave way to in-depth classroom discussion that I think would be lacking if we had discussed the chapter in a more traditional fashion. This is an activity that I would definitely try again.