I really appreciate educators who share their ideas on social media so I can implement them in my own classroom! One idea I implemented for my science review, which could easily be used in EVERY subject, was “Strike a Pose”! I can’t remember who posted the idea originally, but I did tweak it a little bit to fit our needs.

This works best with questions that would be in a multiple choice format. After you have all your questions & answer possibilities written out, you assign each answer a pose (it is easiest to keep the same pose for the same letter throughout the whole thing).

Once everything is set up, it is pretty simple! Put the question on the board, have the different poses listed on the slide, then have students strike the pose that correlates with their answer!

We rotate for science, so I was able to try this with 4 different classes. I still don’t have it perfect, but each time I learned something different. For example, make sure the students are spread out enough because some of the poses required balance that some students don’t have. Set explicit expectations for how they strike the pose so no one gets hurt (especially important if you do the karate kick pose). The biggest thing I learned with the first class was to give them wait time! So by the fourth class, this is what it looked like.

1. I would put the question on the board & read the question as well as possible answers.
2. I would give students think time, they would give me a signal when they had their answer ready (in our class, we use a lightbulb).
3. When all students are giving the signal, I would say,  “Strike a pose!” and students would hit the pose that correlated with their answer.
4. We would discuss misconceptions or review content as needed before moving on to the next question.

I think it is important to engage and assess our students in different ways. I could have had them write their letter answer on a piece of paper & correct it with them when we were all finished, but that would have been a lot less fun! In fact, my students didn’t even realize I was assessing their learning while we were doing this!

Using Strike a Pose for a formative assessment was quite informing. At a glance, I was able to see what my students were thinking and address misconceptions right then & there. It is also hard for students to fake their answers. Even though they can easily copy the poses their classmates are doing, you can see the delay in their response, letting you know they either aren’t confident in their answer or don’t understand.

Having multiple ways to assess student learning is very important! While there are many ways to do that, I thought this was a unique & engaging way to gather information about my students’ learning!