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Dr. Fred Jones's
Tools for Teaching

Preferred Activity Time (PAT)
Having Fun With Responsibility Training

This article is condensed from Dr. Jones' award winning book Tools for Teaching. Illustrations by Brian Jones for Tools for Teaching.

In the previous segment, we learned how to use Preferred Activity Time (PAT) and Hurry-up Bonuses to reduce wasted time in the classroom. We mentioned that the two main types of PATs are enrichment activities and learning games.

In this segment, we will give you some specific ideas for PATs. Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to generate preferred activities with the snap of a finger.

TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

The fifth grade students had just taken their seats to begin the school day when their teacher made the following announcement:

“Class, before we start the day, I want to point out the art materials on the project table over by the window. The art project will be your PAT this afternoon.
“As always, I have set aside twenty minutes at the end of the day. You know, however, that once you start a project like this, you always wish you had more time. Well, you can have more time. All the bonus PAT that you earn today will be added to the art project."

The students did not know that, had their teacher never heard of PAT, they would have done the art project anyway. They only knew that all their hustle throughout the day translated into art.

By using learning as a PAT, you get “two for the price of one." You give the students a special enrichment activity they enjoy while getting motivation for free.

SELF-CONTAINED VERSUS DEPARTMENTALIZED

Teachers in self-contained classrooms have more potential PATs during a school day than they can use. They have art and music and reading stories to the class, to say nothing of special projects. Add to that all the curriculum enrichment activities that are available for the units being studied, and they have quite a list. Rather than spending a lot of time planning PAT, these teachers need only pick the best activity of the day and call it PAT.

PAT only becomes a potential headache in a departmentalized setting. Art and music now belong to other departments, and recess is just a memory. Of course, those teachers often will use curriculum enrichment for PAT, just like their colleagues in self-contained classrooms. But their choices are more limited, since they only have their students for one subject.

With fewer “freebies" lying around, those teachers will have to build PATs from scratch more often. If you teach economics, you repeatedly will have to ask yourself, “How do we have fun with economics?" The answer had better be cheap. I cannot grant you extra planning time.

TEAM COMPETITION

Apart from curriculum enrichment activities, team competition is perhaps the most reliable and easy-to-use motivational “hook" in education. Anything can be taught in the form of a team game, and team games make terrific PATs.

The realization that you can make lessons into team games caused me to study team game rules. Did you know there really aren’t that many different games in the world? Did you know that the rules to baseball, football, basketball, hangman, and Jeopardy are all the same?

With a half-dozen sets of rules, you can generate hundreds of PATs, and you won’t need any planning time. You can do it on the spur of the moment!

Let me tell you what makes the best team games -- time-on-task. Kids hate to sit and watch. They love to play. The more they play, the more they learn.

ACADEMIC BASEBALL

More Playing Time
In baseball, your team is up roughly half the time and the other team is up roughly half of the time. If PAT lasts 20 minutes, your team only will be up for about 10 minutes. By having innings, in which teams takes turns at bat, you halve the length of everybody’s PAT.

How can we improve the rules of the game so kids spend more time playing and less time on the sidelines? The answer is defense. Make the students play defense, and they will be engaged in playing when the other team is up at bat.

Playing Defense
You can play the game with questions at four levels of difficulty: singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. Those questions usually come right off the top of your head. If you want to simplify the game, make every question worth a run.

Lay out two diamonds on the floor with small pieces of masking tape as bases. Have students get out of their seats to “run the bases." They have fun strutting their stuff, and you don’t have to keep track of who’s on base.

Arrange students into two teams. From the team that is “up" first, pick a student and say,

“Batter up! Do you want a single, double, triple or home run?"

“Fly ball!"

That brings us to our next element of team game structure. Do you play the game open-book or closed-book? Aha! If you play the game open-book, the team on defense can start looking up the answer as soon as they hear the question. As a result, the team on defense frantically flips through books, lab manuals, and notes to find the answer while the student who is “up" attempts to answer the question. There is actually peer pressure to look up the answer, since dropping a fly ball means that a teammate was simply too lazy to look up the answer.

There is a certain contagion to looking up the answer that fills the room. Since kids hate to sit on the sidelines with nothing to do, the students on the team that is “at bat" usually start looking up the answer as well.

After you say, “Fly ball!" wait at least five seconds or until the rustling of book pages dies down. Then, call on a student. By calling on whomever you please, you can distribute questions more effectively while assuring that the weaker students get questions that they have a good chance of answering.

Scoring
If students on defense answer the question correctly, they catch the fly ball and make an out on the other team. If, however, they miss the question and drop the fly ball, the batter is on base with an error, and all runners advance one base.

Normally in baseball the team with the most runs wins, but not in this game. In this game, the final score for each team is calculated as runs minus outs. Catching a fly ball nullifies a run. In the final score, it’s the equivalent of hitting a solo home run. Defense is serious business.

BASEBALL BECOMES “DOUBLE-DIAMOND BASEBALL"

Alternate questions between the teams. Consequently, a team would be up for one question and then on defense for the following question. By alternating questions between teams, each team has the same number of at-bats, and the dramatic tension is maximized since everyone can see who is ahead at any moment and what difficulty of question is needed to score.

Alternating questions in that fashion eliminates innings. Rather, you have two games running side-by-side like a race. It’s a race to see which team can get around the bases more often before time runs out.

The generic name for that game format is Ping-Pong, since play continually alternates back and forth between sides. Since you have two baseball diamonds on the floor, however, we have gotten into the habit of referring to that version of academic baseball as “Double-Diamond Baseball."

BASEBALL BECOMES FOOTBALL

To change baseball to football, draw two gridirons on the board, one for each team. Begin the game by saying to a student,

“Ten, twenty, thirty, or forty yard question. What will it be?"

“Sack!"

An alternative way of structuring academic football is to pit one team against another on a single gridiron, as in the real game of football. Secondary students often prefer that variant. Start on the fifty-yard line. Rather than using the Ping-Pong format, each team gets three downs to score. Three downs to score forces the students to use the long yardage questions.

If a ten-yard question is missed, the teacher says, “Sack!" as in the previous example. A correct answer throws the offense for a ten-yard loss. If, however, a twenty-, thirty- or forty-yard question is missed, the teacher says, “Interception!" A correct answer gains possession of the ball at the line of scrimmage.

Of course, teachers can elaborate that basic format to suit their pleasure. You could have extra point questions after a touchdown. You could have difficult “Hail Mary" questions when more than forty yards are desperately needed. I have even seen teachers have a classroom Super Bowl complete with a satirical coin-toss ceremony. One teacher played football so often that she made a felt board for the gridiron with a felt football so she could make changes in field position more easily.

FOOTBALL BECOMES BASKETBALL

Think of football as simply a “path game," like the preschoolers’ board game, Candyland. In such games, players move down the “squares" of the path in order to reach a “goal." A gridiron is simply a path with ten squares.

Once you envision games played on courts or fields as path games, you can play basketball or soccer just as easily as you can football. By answering more difficult questions, you can move down the path several squares at a time in order to score more quickly.

Basketball is simply a path game that requires seven “moves" in order to score, whereas football requires ten moves to score. In basketball, if the team with the ball misses the question and the team on defense answers it, they “steal the ball." The game then switches directions.

HANGMAN

“What’ll it be? One, two, three, or four body parts?"

JEOPARDY

“Pick a ten, twenty, thirty, or forty point question. The category is…"

ACADEMIC VOLLEYBALL

Perfect for Vocabulary
In volleyball, your team can score only when you have the serve. When you have the serve, you can score points in succession. If, however, you miss, the service goes to the other team. Then, they can score points in succession until they miss.

You would not want to use questions that require explanations for answers. A team could be on defense a long time if the other team were to run up a string of points. For such questions, baseball would be a much better choice.

For volleyball, the questions must come “fast and furious" with quick answers to keep the game from dragging. The quick pace of questions makes volleyball ideal for vocabulary. Volleyball, therefore, often is used by foreign language teachers and biology teachers.

“I will begin by giving a word to one of the teams. Then, I will point to a person on that team. You will have one second to give me the first letter of the word. Then, I will point to another person on that same team, and he or she will have one second to give me the next letter of the word.
“If someone misses, the word will come over to the other team. I will point to someone on that team, and he or she must pick up where the other team left off. The second team will keep the word as long as they spell it correctly. If they miss a letter, the word comes back to the first team. The team that gives me the last letter of the word gets the point and the next word.
“Ready? Here we go! The first word is ‘photosynthesis.’"

For younger students whose attention spans are short, you can reduce the burden on memory and attention as follows. Give the word to the entire class, and have them write it down. Then, as the word is being spelled, everyone can follow along to keep track.

KEEP ‘EM HONEST

Perfect for Math
What kind of game rules work for math? The whole class could fall asleep while the person who is “up" attempted to solve a quadratic equation.

The game described below keeps everybody busy and eliminates paper grading. Arrange students into two teams. Pair each member of Team A with a member of Team B, and have the pairs place their desks side by side. Write a math problem on the board, and give each problem a time limit as follows:

“All right, class, you have two minutes for this next problem. (Write the equation on the board.) Ready? Go!"

“Class, you have fifteen seconds."

Work Check Routine
When time runs out, go through the following routine:

“Time! Exchange papers.
“The answer is...
“Check them and return them.
“How many got it right on Team A?
“How many got it right on Team B?
“The score is now___ to___
“Class, you have three minutes for the next problem."

Would anybody on Team A cheat for anybody on Team B? Not likely!

After the papers are returned, would students on Team B let their counterparts on Team A hold up their hands if they did not get it right? What do you think?

The whole check routine takes seconds, and each team keeps the other team honest. With every additional problem the score mounts and the tension builds.

MORE PATS

These examples of PAT games are meant to whet your appetite. There are more examples of PATs in Tools for Teaching and on our web site. Yet, every teacher has good ideas for PATs. If you get together with some of your colleagues, you can develop your own PAT Bank. As your repertoire of PATs grows, you will find that the notion of having fun with learning increasingly permeates your teaching.

Article by Dr. Fred Jones
Education World®
Copyright © 2008 Education World

05/13/2008