Prepare | Teach | Facilitate

Join the CHAMPS! - great starters make for great lessons

Parting (or Party!) strategies for making lessons stick

Published July 2023


Joining the CHAMPS means implementing one of the most effective teaching strategies for planning effective lessons. The CHAMPS acronym stands for “Connection, Hook, Acts, Main, Plenary, Starter”. This method helps to create engaging learning experiences, driving student success and fostering an interactive learning environment.

We have discussed how to Connect and Hook concepts in lessons. We have also looked at the segmentation of lessons into Acts and reviewed strategies for designing the Main and Starter parts of great lessons. This article is about Plenaries and how to use them in lesson planning.

Desk organised for lesson planning

Why are plenaries important?

Effective use of plenaries is a vital part of teaching strategies. A plenary is a summary and conclusion of the lessons that should help the students and teachers have a marker for progress. The plenary must link back to the learning outcome, themes, or skills of the lesson. Aim to make it different in style from the ‘acts’/lesson segments that preceded it so it is something students look forward to or anticipate.

Plenaries can take a variety of forms—verbal, written, symbols, and games. The one(s) you choose will depend on how it connects to the rest of the lesson.

Get them talking

Effective verbal communication skills is an essential skill that should be taught and encouraged to be practiced at school. Let students verbalise what they have earned. You can go round in tables or individually. Challenge them to make a link to the outcome and come up with something unique. There’s lots of ways to facilitate this, my favourite ideas are below.

Get them talking—I also learned…

‘I also learned…’ is a good one to encourage personalised contributions. Students can take turns to try to come up with something relevant but different to what the preceding students have said.

Get them talking - ‘Celebrity heads’

The game ‘celebrity heads’ can be deployed here too. Have one student in front of the board facing the class. Write a name or term from the lesson, and the students at the front get to ask yes/no questions to guess the word on the board.

Get them talking - ‘Just a minute’

‘Just a minute’ is a time-linked way to get students to practice public speaking and build up their stamina in this. This can be very open and unrehearsed where students (individually or in groups) are asked to deliver a speech about what they learned within a minute. Students can vote for the best. You’d be surprised at how many students cannot make their speech last up to a minute without an elongated pause or repetition.

Get them talking - ‘Just a few words’

‘Just a few words’ is similar to the above. The teacher sets a word limit, and students take turns to describe the word or answer a question sticking to this limit.

Get them talking - Charades

Charades or variations on charades is guaranteed to get students quite excited. One of my favourite variations on this theme is ‘keywords unwrap’. It requires minimal preparation as you just make a note of words during the lesson, cut up and wrap/scrunch these up.

Towards the end of the lesson, the class is divided into two groups and each group has a minute to guess as many unwrapped words as possible based on the description of one student from their group. Throw in a few red herrings and irrelevant words (or numbers!) for laughs.

Silent mirror charades are similar but round-based and head to head. One word at a time, each group has to compete to be the first to guess the word being described using actions only simultaneously by a representative from each group.

Other plenary friendly popular party games that get students excited are Taboo and Jeopardy. Both of these games take a bit more preparation as the clues need to be carefully thought through to make the game effective. Once ready, the game can be laminated or printed out on durable card stock, so they can be reused with ease.

Get them writing

Effective written communication skills is an essential skill that should be taught and encouraged to be practiced at school. Get students to write a sentence to summarise their learning or as an evaluation of the lesson. Students could be asked to expand on the sentence with examples.

Get them writing - Exit tickets

Exit tickets can be structured or very open to allow students to be more creative. For example, a structured version could be a writing frame that has the outcomes on and students are required to complete a task related to the lesson outcomes. A more open version could have reflection prompts such as ‘the most important thing I learned this lesson was …’.

Exit tickets can be used as evaluation tools for the teacher. An additional prompt could be ‘what I enjoyed most about this lesson was…’ or ‘If I was the teacher, one way I would change this lesson is….’. Students may need training as to what a constructive response may look like.

Writing may encourage students to express when they do not feel confident to do so verbally or openly within the class. Exit tickets may elicit questions students have relating to clarification or extension. Prompts or part filled templates such as ‘a question I have is…’, ‘I did not really understanding….’, ‘ would X (student opts for an example) be a good example of Y (teacher perils or student states concept or term from lesson)?’.

Get them writing - Answering exam questions

Answering exam questions with allocated marks makes for good time limited writing practice. The response does not simply have to be written. It could be multiple-choice based, graphing, labelling or sequencing.

Get them writing - general writing

Writing a letter can be used to boost formal letter writing skills and literacy. Letter writing conventions are a skill some students may never have been exposed to other than being taught these in school. Students can even ‘post’ or exchange the letter for an added bit of fun.

Text a summary is fun and more meaningful for some students. Having a phone-related template could be used. Students may even want to use ‘text’ speech or abbreviations, as long as it is understandable!

Tweeting a summary is a good way to encourage concise writing. This could be structured as a response or reaction to an existing tweet.

Use symbols or imagery

Symbols are a way to minimise verbal and written contributions. This works well for variation, if some quiet is needed, there are students who are less comfortable or unable to contribute in the ways above. It also enables you to quickly survey learning or understanding. For example, a sea of red using the first example below may mean you need to revisit the concept taught in that lesson.

Use symbols or imagery—Traffic lights

Traffic lights can use two or 3 colours. Students can be issued reusable red, green and orange (or just red and green) sheets. I once worked in a school that had red, green and orange pages in the student planner each year to have this ready to go in all classes. Once the traffic lights are issued to students, ask students to ‘show their level’ of confidence in their learning or certain concepts from the lesson.

True or false statements also lend themselves well to traffic lights. They can be used to gauge student learning with orange for being unsure or ‘in the middle’. Alternatively, you can issue true or false statements or the learning outcomes and get students to traffic light these by colouring in.

Smiley faces, emojis, thumbs up/thumbs down can be used in all the same context as the above but have the advantage of not needing colour.

Use symbols or imagery - Images

Images can be effective depending on the context of the lesson. They can be used for matching to text, sequencing or as responses to verbal cues. In science, images of materials in different states can be used to confirm students understand the characteristics of each state. For example, the teacher calls out ‘fixed arrangement of particles’; students should all put up the solid. Images of elements or their symbols from the periodic table could be similarly used. In history, photographs could be used. For example, images relating to a timeline could be jumbled and students have to sequence these.

Use games to anchor what they’ve learnt

This is a popular plenary option. This can be prepared well in advance or on the spot. For example, an on the spot one I like to use for younger senior students is the word train. Here, students must state a relevant word in succession or will be out and must sit until the winner is the last person left standing. There is to be no hesitation or repetition. They (or you!) can add sound effects.

Ball based games can be used here too. Catch and seek is an easy one. Whichever student catches the ball has to contribute a sentence or question relevant to the lesson or choose a student to do so. Balls with numbers on can be used to allocate questions to students. You can either throw a bunch of balls in the air for students to catch or have students pick from a bag of balls. These can be standardised so 1 always means the student must complete the sentence ‘A list of keywords from this lesson is…’.

There is always a new game you don’t know about, so ask students for ideas!