eMysteries Toolkit

The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. [Project Number: 2019-1-DE03-KA201-060127] 28 recommendations on the teaching methods which can be applied by teachers during their lessons. Activity-based learning Activity-based learning happens when the teacher incorporates different types of activities during the lessons. Specifically, it allows teachers to organize their lesson by providing opportunities to students to develop and apply skills during meaningful activities. Such activities can facilitate the learning of difficult concepts and processes and allow students to take responsibility for their own learning. The lessons which are organized based on activities shift the focus from the teacher to the student. In this regard, students participate more actively in the learning process. One example of activity-based learning would be to highlight the “investigative” skills of students through the reading of specific passages of mystery detective stories on their own. As detectives, students would detect the general characteristics of the text as ‘mystery fiction’ or ‘detective story’ (Price -Anisman 1985); make a list of clues; or research how characters are introduced. Reciprocal teaching Reciprocal teaching can support an active teacher- student dialogue during an attempt to gain meaning from a text through scaffolded or supported assistance. During the dialogue, students are engaged in the learning of cognitive strategies such as predicting (I think… I expect…), questioning (I wonder who … what… why?), clarifying (I didn’t quite understand who, why, what…) and summarizing . Reciprocal teaching uses each of the four strategies of prediction, questioning, clarification and summarizing separately but also as a whole and it is an effective strategy that provides students the opportunity to extend their current skills and knowledge. In order for this to be achieved, teachers should capture students’ attention, simplify tasks so that they are manageable, and motivate students to actively participate in the learning process. As an example, students in group take on different roles, predictor, clarifier, questioner, or summarizer, as they read through chapters of a mystery detective story and select examples from text. Teacher uses their input and text excerpts to generate discussion in class (adapted from Oczkus 2018).