Last year, Joel Lawrence and I worked on some community building resources for tutor time at St. Joes. They were meant to be used as part of an induction phase, maybe weeks 1-2 of term.
Nothing ground-breaking here! Just sharing ideas – feel free to make a copy if useful somehow, edit, etc.
Lesson 1: Creative self-portraits
This is an activity based on Chaz Pugliese’s ideas from the book Being Creative. Students create a community art wall of abstract self-portraits which show their hobbies and interests.
Lesson 2: Important dates
The tutor group create a monthly calendar of important dates, which they amend and add to each month. (One image in there is from my old colleagues tutor wall – thanks Gary)
Lesson 3: Our wider community
Introducing the importance of ‘student voice’. Encouraging the group to regularly share feedback about the school and their learning.
Lesson 4: Community and belonging
A shorter session reflecting on the question ‘what does community mean to you?’
Lesson 5: Onboarding new students
This is a bit of a text-heavy intro to a tutor group project – creating a welcome pack for new joiners. This evolved a bit into a project with my Year 9s but the whole thing was a bit organic. I’d have done this much better, but the first few slides were an okay lead-in to the topic. The headshot was of our Head of High School at the time, Lee ‘The Taskmaster’ Merrett.
Categories: General, Lesson Ideas, other, teacher development
ELT Planning 
I’m attempting to build inclusion between year groups with my university students, so the onboarding idea seems like a splendid way to do this for freshmen and women.
In fact, I would like the students to create a welcome video as part of their project so they get used to sharing ideas with incoming learners.
I’ll see how this goes and will blog about this in the coming months for the spring semester.
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