– Hello everyone. My name’s Lisa Clughen and I’m a senior lecturer in Spanish at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. I’m going to share with you a wonderful collaborative learning activity called From Me to You. It’s a very engaging activity that uses rhythmic movement as a way of structuring student collaboration to enhance learning and to encourage a sense of belonging in the classroom. So I’ll explain how it works. First, you invite the students to form circles of say, five to seven people. Each student writes their name at the top of a piece of paper, and then when I give a signal, they pass that paper to the right. Then I begin asking questions about the course content and when I give the signal, they pass that paper to the right and that’s the procedure until the person has the paper back with their name on it.

I’ll give you an example from my Spanish classes. So students write their name on the piece of paper and then when I give them a signal in Spanish, they pass that paper to their right. So I’ll say, and then I’ll start asking questions about things I want the students to revise from the course. So I might say, “Write three adjectives “that immediately spring to mind on your paper,” or, “Finish this sentence in Spanish.” , I like. Or I might say, “Ask the person on the sheet “a question in Spanish.” And so on and so forth, until the student with their name on the sheet has their paper back. And then they can start to see what’s written on the sheet and then we can have a bit of a chat and a group debrief.

It’s very simple, but there is a lot going on here as research shows that rhythmic coordinated movement promotes all sorts of pro-social behaviors and positive emotions that are so fundamental to learning. For example, it can help us to be more open to cooperate with others. And research also shows that it can help us to feel better about ourselves, improve our self-esteem. It works by what is called interpersonal synchrony. To generate the benefits of interpersonal synchrony, it’s quite important that they move at the same time, that they wait for my signal and then they move. But don’t worry if they don’t manage to do that, because any movement is great at encouraging interaction, student collaboration.

So to sum up, this From Me to You activity is great at fostering student collaboration and also a sense of belonging in the classroom. And what is really useful about it is that it creates a real buzz in the classroom as students look at their paper at the end to see what everybody’s written, and then answer the questions that have been written posed to them with each other. And then, of course, as a lecturer, I can hear their responses, respond to them, ask more questions, and have a really good debrief at the end of the session. The students really seem to enjoy it. So I’ve used this for years. It’s become a real feel safe in my teaching activity toolkit. So, why not try it? See how it goes, and let me know.