I’m a fan of regularly trying to create situations where students teach their classmates (see The Best Posts On Helping Students Teach Their Classmates — Help Me Find More).

This year, my Intermediate ELL History classes, led by talented student teachers, have been teaching my Beginning ELL students.

The template of the lessons (lasting fifteen or twenty minutes) is having each Intermediate teach one-or-two Beginners in small groups. They introduce six or so new words and help Beginners learn their meaning. Then they introduce a very short-and-simple Read Aloud that uses those pre-taught words. Then, they show their “students” a related picture and teach a few more words related to the image. Finally, the “teachers” helps the “students” write sentences about the picture on little whiteboards.

You can download the student/teacher template and planning sheet here.

One of my student teachers, Mary Stokke, developed yesterday’s lesson on knights in the Middle Ages. You can download it here. Afterwards, everybody watched the move Excalibur for the rest of the period.

Next, the history students will start creating their own lessons (based on a common topic the class has studied) to teach to the Beginners.

It seemed to go pretty well.

Suggestions for how to improve it are welcome.