Teach17

Sometimes you want a classroom to be quiet without simply telling pupils to copy something from the board.

A good quiet task should still make pupils retrieve, think, connect, check, improve or create something. These 17 activities work across different subjects and need little or no preparation.

1. The Blank Page Challenge

Give pupils a topic and a blank page. For five minutes, they write everything they can remember without using books or notes. Afterwards, they check what they missed in a different colour.

2. Draw What You Know

Instead of writing notes, pupils represent a topic as a diagram, timeline, flowchart, labelled sketch or other visual. They then add short annotations to explain it.

3. Find Five Mistakes

Put an answer, paragraph, method or explanation on the board containing several deliberate mistakes. Pupils quietly identify and correct as many as they can.

4. The Ten-Word Summary

Pupils have to summarise the main idea of the lesson in exactly ten words. Once they have done it, ask them to reduce it to five.

5. Write the Questions

Give pupils five answers on the board. Their task is to write a good question for each answer. Challenge them to make some questions harder than simple recall.

6. Explain Why

Give pupils several statements that they already know to be true. Instead of simply recalling them, they have to explain why each one is true.

7. Rank and Justify

Give pupils several ideas, factors, methods, events or examples from the topic. They rank them according to a criterion and write a short justification for their top and bottom choices.

8. The Memory Diagram

Show pupils a diagram, model, map, process or structure briefly. Remove it and ask them to recreate as much as possible from memory. Show it again afterwards so they can check.

9. Improve Yesterday’s Work

Ask pupils to return to a piece of previous work and find three things they could improve now that they know more. Improvement becomes the task rather than simply correcting spelling.

10. Compare Two

Put two related ideas on the board. Pupils silently write what they have in common, how they differ and one connection between them.

11. Create the Perfect Example

Give pupils a concept and ask them to invent the clearest possible example of it. Then ask them to explain exactly why their example fits.

12. From Weak to Excellent

Put a deliberately basic answer on the board. Pupils rewrite it to make it as strong as possible by adding precision, evidence, explanation or detail.

13. The Knowledge Map

Write one key idea in the middle of a page. Pupils build a web of everything they can connect to it, adding brief explanations to show how the ideas are linked.

14. Three Levels of Question

Pupils write three questions about the topic: one easy, one challenging and one that would really test somebody who understood it well. They then write the answers.

15. What Do I Still Not Know?

Ask pupils to divide a page into three sections: things I know securely, things I partly understand and things I need to revisit. They then choose one weakness and do something about it.

16. The One-Page Topic

Challenge pupils to fit everything genuinely important about a topic onto one side of paper. They have to decide what deserves space and what can be left out.

17. Fix the Gap

Finish with a short retrieval task. Pupils mark or check their own answers, identify the biggest gap in their knowledge and spend the final few minutes repairing that gap using their notes or textbook.

Quiet work does not have to mean passive work.

In fact, some of the most useful independent tasks are quiet because every pupil has to do the thinking for themselves. The key is to give pupils something purposeful to retrieve, explain, organise, improve or solve rather than simply something to keep them occupied.