M9: Gallery Walk

In a Gallery Walk, stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

A Gallery Walk can take a variety of forms, so it is best to think of it in as a general concept: students go from station to station accomplishing a task involving oral language.

• The activities can be teacher-directed, where the teacher sets up the activities at each station. This type of set up could be a very useful way to provide practice on multiple skills simultaneously and even a great opportunity to bring in parent volunteers to work at each station. It can also be a valuable time for the teacher to conduct informal assessment.
• The activities can also be student-directed. Depending on their level, groups of students can:
  • create informative posters and give mini-presentations to other students, and conduct a Q&A about it. 
  • develop a learning activity to lead their classmates in an activity to teach or demonstrate a specific concept. I really like doing this version  with the pre-service teachers in my classes!

For a deeper look at the Gallery Walk, watch the video below and read the description in the 99 Strategies Book.

(For the text version of this video, enable the closed captioning in the video and/or open to YouTube, if you want to access the transcript).