Activity aim: To prompt discussion; to facilitate peer teaching, content review, or practice
Materials needed: Sticky notes, pieces of tape, or shipping labels. This is also possible to do without any of these things (students can hold up their cards as they walk around).
Time: 10-20 minutes (or more), depending on the group size, the list of questions, and how many times students switch partners
Activity Description
This activity can be used in a wide variety of ways. The major goal is to stimulate conversation, facilitate review, and/or encourage peer teaching: especially around topics that may be polarizing, or that don’t have yes-or-no answers. This provides a way for students to talk to each other without the requirement of being “on the spot” in front of the entire class.
At the Center for Teaching and Learning, we’ve run this activity using this post from Hybrid Pedagogy: “A Bill of Rights and Principles for Teaching in the Digital Age” (web link)).
Before class, the instructor numbers the statements on the list from 1-30 and provides them in handout form for students to read. Students read the list and choose the three most important statements to them, and one statement with which they don’t agree (or which is the least important in some way).
Students take their piece of paper / post-it note, and divide it in half with a line. They write the number (and only the number!) of the three most important statements to them on the top, and the number of the least important statement on the bottom.
The instructor should ask students to take their handout with them when they get up.
In the first “round” of conversations, students should find one or two people who share at least one of their “top” numbers. They should discuss why they feel the way that they do.
In the next round, students should find someone who doesn’t share any of their numbers. They should explain their top and bottom numbers to each other, and try to find similarities in what they’re both saying about them.
In the next round, students should find someone whose bottom number is the same as one of their top numbers and spend some time figuring out why this is the case.
In the final round, students should find someone whose bottom number is the same as theirs, and they should talk about what they learned or discussed in the previous round with their new partner.
You can think of additional combinations of prompts. It might be helpful, after this activity is over, to have students do some additional reflecting work. For example, students could return to their seats and spend some time freewriting about what they learned from their discussion partners and whether or not this changed their mind about which numbers they had selected to put on the top and the bottom. Or, they could return to their seats and do this verbally with the person next to them.
Image credit: Stormtroopers 365, Flickr Creative Commons (web link)