hit and miss

My last post described a terrible lesson in which I tried to create teams in a 2p history class. Today, after being out the class for 1.5 days for meetings, I decided to try again. What a difference it can make when certain students are absent! I changed a few small things but kept others the same from Monday. I took one of the teambuilding ideas from a Kagan book and had the teams play "Team Boggle" for about 5 minutes before settling down to do anything academic. Today was much better, due in part to the fact that we were missing some of the negative "poison" that some students can infect a room with. I highly recommend using Boggle as a teambuilder. Now, if I can just stay in the building for more than a day at a time! Cheers.