There are a variety of ways in which Lyfta can be used with young people; students really value the documentary films where they “meet” citizens of the world. We believe that Lyfta can be used to facilitate great class discussions, which can provide excellent opportunities for students to reflect on what they’ve seen and support them with processing, reasoning and evaluation.
Pre-viewing discussion strategies:
One strategy is to prompt your students to discuss before they view the documentary, inviting them to practise their prediction and inference skills.
Some teachers prompt their students to discuss what they think the storyworld will be about using just the symbol on the storyworld. For example, as seen below, some of our teachers show students the following to elicit predictions about the storyworld they will visit today.
Post-viewing discussions:
Where a Lyfta video or resource forms the common base for understanding amongst a group of students, we have a few recommendations for planning a post-viewing discussion, which include:
Thinking about what role you are going to play as a teacher
Are you going to play the impartial chairperson, devil’s advocate or declare your perspective?
Establishing ground rules
E.g. ensuring everyone is heard and respected, challenging the ideas not the people, respecting diversity of group and so forth.
Being prepared for when/if discussions trigger emotional responses
Reminder: Some of our films have the traffic light symbol - to understand why, click the content and it will explain in the lesson plan.
Setting objectives and timeframe for the discussion
For example, when students visit Malte in Berlin, they might want to focus on a specific question, such as ‘Why did Malte switch careers?’, which can be supported with this lesson plan.
Summarising, reflecting and discussing next steps
Providing sentence starters or model answers to help make room for every student to experience success within the lesson.