Movie Guides: A Necessity in the Classroom
December 4, 2016Don’t show another movie and feel guilty that students aren’t learning anything! Movies definitely deserve a place in the classroom. If you select the right movies along with high quality movie guides, it can make a long lasting impact!
I still remember watching Roots in 8th grade as we were learning about America history. My teacher had a carefully crafted movie guide to help us reflect on what we were watching. We stopped after every important event, discussed it and then wrote down our reflective thoughts. It turned what would’ve been an otherwise just another movie into something I have remembered for 20+ years.
Throughout my 10 years of teaching, I’ve noticed how little students learn from movies when they are not prompted to think about important events. Sure, they are entertained and enjoy the experience of watching a movie, but they usually don’t have the same takeaway as a thoughtful adult. I’m teachertravis and I hope these movie guides provides a genuine learning experiencing for your students. Please let me know if you have any requests for movie guides that are not currently available on this site.
Steps for creating a valuable movie guide experience for your students:
- Visit my movie guide shop and download the PDF movie guide.
- Print out the the movie guide for your students (I always print movie guides using the double-sided printing feature)
- Pause the movie at the designated times on the movie guide. Discuss the question with students as a class or direct them to discuss the question with a partner.
- Give students time at the end of the movie to answer the essay questions or assign it as homework.
Awesome site you have here but I was wondering if you knew of any message boards that
cover the same topics talked about here? I’d really love to be
a part of community where I can get opinions from other experienced individuals
that share the same interest. If you have any
suggestions, please let me know. Cheers!
Hi KG,
I’m glad your interested in this topic. I’m actually in the process of creating a FB group for this very reason, where teachers can discuss the educational usage of movies in the classroom. I’ll post it here when it is ready 😉
I’m also interested in research based methods for maximizing the learning potential from movies. I only get to show about 2 or 3 per year to my students, but when I get the opportunity, I try to select quality movies and that teach students life lessons. Then, throughout the year, I reference characters and concepts that we learned about during the movie to remind students about their behavior.