Spotlight on Strategies

I remember sitting in a large conference room on my first day as a new teacher. It was the New Teacher Induction program for my district, and one of the sessions reviewed engaging instructional strategies. I immediately liked “I Have, Who Has,” because it was applicable to any topic and was relatively easy to create. Now that I have been intentionally integrating technology and media sources into my lessons, I have been looking for ways to keep old strategies that students liked and learned from, while somehow updating them by integrating a technological component.

Instead of always creating the “I Have, Who Has’ cards myself, I can use technology to have students create the cards. I can show a video and require, say, two pairs of “I Have, Who Has” cards from each student or each group. This strategy will keep students engaged throughout the entire video for two reasons: one, they need to create and answer their questions on the cards, and two, they know the game is coming at the end, so they need to know the answers to everyone else’s questions. A win-win for student engagement!

The adaptation of this activity also allows teachers to level based on student need. Perhaps your class is split into a higher ability group and lower ability group. Give the higher students blank cards that they have to create, and give the lower ability students a pre-made “Who Has,” and their task becomes listening for that fact and writing the answer (I Have). To avoid repeated questions, perhaps a few groups get questions/answers from the first 2 minutes of the video, the next groups from the next 2 minutes and so forth. If the information is really important to your content area, then don’t put parameters on the video and let there be repeats. It can’t hurt!

The added value to student learning and understanding is the wide range of learning styles this activity incorporates. The video caters to the auditory, visual, and logistical (depending on the content) learner. The actual game reinforces auditory learning and improves listening skills. Click on the link below to see a detailed example of  ‘I Have, Who Has’ for my circles unit in Geometry.

Link to Smore Presentation: I Have, Who Has?