One of my students’ all-time favorite projects was our “Teach Me How to Teach” science project, where students research a topic, build a lesson, and actually teach it to the class with a hands-on activity. I ran it during two of the trickiest stretches of the year for engagement: the week before spring break, and those long days after testing at the end of the year. Both times, it kept students genuinely excited about learning.
It started as my attempt to put a fresh spin on the tired “research, make a slideshow, present” assignment, and to let students apply the skills they’d built during our Ecosystems Museum Projects earlier in the year. What I got back blew me away.
CHOOSING “TEACH ME” TOPICS
For the first round, students taught one of our Earth History objectives: how the surface of the earth changes through slow processes like erosion and weathering and rapid ones like landslides, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes.
For the second round, students took on objectives we hadn’t covered yet, split into two teams of teachers:
- Rocks and Minerals — identifying minerals by physical properties (hardness, color, luster, cleavage, streak), and classifying rocks as metamorphic, sedimentary, or igneous.
- Vitamins and Minerals — the role of vitamins, minerals, and exercise in keeping the body healthy.
STEP 1: SPARK INTEREST WITH AN ANTICIPATION GUIDE
I launched the first unit with a true/false anticipation guide from a Plate Tectonics mini-unit I’d built called “The Changing Earth.” These statements never fail to hook students:
- Mountains can form when one land mass collides into another. True, the Himalayas formed when India and Asia collided 50 million years ago. 225 million years ago, India was an island.
- Islands can form when lava piles up on the ocean floor and reaches the surface. True, Iceland’s island of Surtsey formed exactly this way.
- Mountains can be found in the ocean. True, the earth’s longest mountain range is underwater.
- Cities can move so much they swap places with other cities. True, Los Angeles (on the Pacific Plate) sits about 340 miles south of San Francisco (on the North American Plate). In roughly 16 million years, plate movement will put LA north of SF.
- Oceans can shrink over time. True, the Pacific basin is slowly shrinking as the Atlantic basin opens up and pushes the Americas westward.
STEPS 2-4: RESEARCH, PLAN, AND SCHEDULE
After choosing a true/false statement to investigate and getting introduced to the idea of the changing Earth, students learned they’d be the teachers, working in partners (I let them pick their own, risky, but it worked).
Each partnership chose a specific topic for their lesson from a list I’d generated around the objective. Then they used a planning sheet to research, build a slideshow, and, importantly, design a hands-on activity to help their “students” learn. I gave them about a week of science time and met with each pair to talk through their activity, doing a lot of behind-the-scenes searching for activities they could realistically run.
For scheduling, I found every 45-minute-to-1-hour block I could spare in the week before break (and before the last day, for round two). With larger projects already wrapped, I could have two partnerships teach per day, sequenced so the topics built on each other. On other days, pairs got time to keep prepping, gather materials, and check in with me.
SHOWTIME: STUDENTS TEACH
Then it was time to teach. Across the project, students built models of the layers of the Earth, assembled Pangaea and tectonic-plate puzzles, erupted baking soda volcanoes, ran a “types of volcanoes” sort, and modeled tsunamis and earthquakes. Every single lesson was hands-on, which I’ll honestly admit I don’t always manage when I’m planning solo.
REFLECTION AND FEEDBACK
Reflection turned out to be essential. Each partnership completed a reflection form together: complimenting their own work, naming what they’d improve, noting the unexpected things that came up (welcome to teaching), and discussing how they shared the planning and teaching load.
Peer feedback mattered too. After all the work of researching, building, and teaching a lesson, students deserved positive feedback from their classmates. For my own feedback, I kept a short list of what to watch: knowledge of topic, lesson organization, completeness of the presentation, how well partners shared the teaching, and the hands-on activity. I rated each “teacher” individually on a 1-4 scale (matching our report cards), with room for written remarks. Telling note: when partners didn’t share the presenting well, I sometimes couldn’t tell whether both students actually knew the material, useful data in itself.
WHY I LOVED THIS PROJECT
A few reasons this became a favorite:
Every lesson was hands-on, without me doing all the work. Helping students find activities and gather materials was far easier than building hands-on lessons for every topic myself. And we got to plan our school day during the school day, a novel concept.
Watching students teach was everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I watched them give clear directions and also watched them get frustrated when classmates talked over them or missed instructions. (“Welcome to my world,” I kept thinking.)
Doing it twice was the real win. Walking students through the same process more than once is one of the most important things I figured out that year. After investing time and energy into learning a skill set, students deserve the chance to apply it again, usually with new content, to build on the first experience and keep honing their skills. They loved it so much the first time that they begged to do it again, which is exactly why I saved round two for after testing.
Want to run this with your own class? Grab my “Teach Me How to Teach” materials free here.
This was one of my go-to projects for those hard-to-fill end-of-year weeks. If you’re looking for more ways to make that stretch meaningful, I’ve got ideas for the last week of school and a reflection process to help you close out your own year well.
