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"Just because students are compliant, doesn't mean they are engaged. Engagement and compliance are not the same thing."
- Jim Warford
What is Chunk-n-Chew?
It is important to give students time to process or chew what we are teaching them. Many classrooms are dominated by the teacher talking and students are not engaged. Students need time to process. As a teacher, I make it a habit to stop instructing after 10 minutes and provide students time to "chew" or process chunks of information. Chuck-n-Chew is also known as 10-2 (10 minutes of teacher instruction and at least 2 minutes of student engagement). The Chunk-n-Chew strategy allows teachers to determine how the students are going to learn and not just what the teachers are going to teach.
How do I implement Chunk-n-Chew?
1. Determine where the 'chew' activities will fit into your lesson.
- Where are the natural "chew" or engagement breaks within your direct instruction or lesson?
- Draw a stop sign at the points in your lesson where you will need to stop direct instruction.
- If you are providing direct instruction for 10 minutes or more, stop! Break up the information into sections or chunks, so students have time to process your information.
2. Determine the 'chew' activity
- The chew activity is only one 2-5 minute activity.
- You will want one engaging activity that allows students to demonstrate their understanding of your "chunk" of instruction.
- It is important to only plan one chew activity, because your 2-5 minutes will go quickly.
- See a list of Chew activities from Marana Unified School District in Arizona.
- Determine if you can break a larger engagement activity into smaller sections and implement each section during a chew activity.
Student Engagement Ideas for Chew Activity
- Provide sentence frames for students to use with a partner to discuss what they learned from the 10 minutes of instruction.
- I learned _________.
- I learned ________ when the teacher said that _________.
- I thought ________.
- I thought about _________ when the teacher told us that ____________.
- I remembered __________.
- I remembered _________ when the teacher taught us about __________.
- See Jeff Zweir's Constructive Conversation Skills Poster.
- Graffiti Wall ~ Have groups of students write or draw down everything they learned from your instruction. See Graffiti Wall process from Queen's Printer for Ontario.
- Provide a concept map and have students fill out a portion of the concept map during each chew activity. See concept map from Education World. See variety of concept maps from M-Stowe.com.
- White Boards ~ Have students write a phrase about what they learned and hold it up to show the class. You can easily make individual white boards by using a piece of paper and a sheet protector. Students write with dry erase markers and erase their answers using socks.
- Sorts ~ Word sorts, picture sorts, concepts sorts or vocabulary sorts. Have students take a few minutes to sort and categorize a group of words/ concepts/ pictures from the direct instruction you just presented.
- Practice Time ~ If you are providing instruction that involves a sequence (math steps, spelling patterns, storyline), then give the students a few minutes to engage in practicing one step of the sequence before moving on to the next step.
Note about this strategy
- You might need to reduce the direct instruction time to less than 10 minutes. The amount of time you spend on direct instruction, before providing a chew activity, will depend on your students' language proficiency levels, ages and content area topics.
Reference:
Institute for Excellence in Education http://excellenceined.org/102-chunk-and-chew/
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