Brainstorming & Consensus-Building – Wildcat Teacher Resource Center

Small Changes That Make a Big Difference in Group Work

Even though cooperative learning is supported by research, so many teachers struggle with it and eventually give it up. Sometimes the smallest tweak in instructional approaches reaps the biggest impact, and group work is no exception. This post provides 17 small changes that can make a big difference in group work.

Authentic Small Group Discussions with the Real Talk Strategy

Real Talk is a small group discussion strategy for teachers who are ready to try an alternative to chaotic free-for all discussions and micromanaged role-based formats. In Real Talk, students create their own talking points, write them on sticky notes, and use a Discussion Board as they have their conversation. They are encouraged not to rush through the conversation and to really dig into their ideas. Real Talk works with any grade level and any text.

Hexagonal Thinking Actvities

Hexagonal thinking is a simple method that yields big critical thinking results. Kids take a set of hexagons with varied terms, concepts, themes, real-world connections, etc. that relate to your current unit of study, and then link them together into an interconnected web. In pairs, groups, or even alone, they must use their critical thinking skills to decide which hexagons link best to which others.

Nearpod 101 (It’s Not Just for Distance Learning!)

The premium version of Nearpod is now FREE for PUHSD teachers! If you’ve never heard of Nearpod or thought it was just for distance learning, come check out its collection of content and activity features…

Iron Chef EduProtocol

The Iron Chef EduProtocol, modeled after the Iron Chef Cooking show, is a modernized version of the jigsaw. Students work in small groups to read, synthesize create, and present to their peers.

Cyber Sandwich EduProtocol

The Cyber Sandwich EduProtocol is a lesson frame in which students work in pairs or small groups to create a collaborative Venn Diagram. They record notes, compare and contrast topics, and summarize what they have read in this structured think-pair-share activity.

Virtual Station Rotation Lessons

Instead of rotating physically like they would in a typical classroom, virtual station rotations have students shifting from one learning activity to the next. The beauty of the station rotation model lies in the small group dynamic, opportunities to differentiate more consistently, and increased student control over the pace at which they move through individual tasks.

Building a Better Breakout Room

Google Meet now gives you the ability to put students into smaller meetings, or breakout rooms, for small-group discussion and collaboration. But just sending students into these rooms won’t usually get you good results, and teachers all over the world have been learning what works best through trial and error. This resource is a summary of the most common tips.

Creative Ways to Use Jamboard

Jamboard is Google’s digital whiteboard that gives students a place to brainstorm and work collaboratively using drawing and writing tools, sticky notes, shapes, images, and more. This resource includes templates and activity ideas including annotations, photo comic strips, voting, pros and cons discussions, Top 10 Lists, and Four Corners.

Send-a-Question

This strategy promotes team building and concept review as well as explorations that are more open-ended. Students work in groups of 3 or 4. Each team “puts their heads together” for a few minutes to develop a question or problem for another team to answer, solve, or respond to. Before they send it to the next team, they must draft an acceptable response to their question…

Two No-Prep Strategies to Crowdsource Student Learning in Your Classroom

In this post are two strategies you can use in your classroom that engage students in “crowdsourcing” learning via retrieval practice. No prep or grading required!

A Better Table Summary

This activity allows students to process the most essential elements of the day’s lesson. They create a summary, combine summaries, and critically analyze their peers’ summaries to come up with better summaries of the day’s lesson.

List, Group, Label

List, Group, Label is an excellent way to have students collaboratively “spill their brains” onto a sheet of paper at the end of a multi-lesson unit. We’ve modified it here so that it embeds the first step of the Ripple, by asking students to brainstorm on their own first.

A-Z Sentence Summary

In this activity, students use alphabet refrigerator magnets to create a Chalkboard Splash review. At the end of a lesson, students choose magnetic letters, attach these to the whiteboard, and write their one-sentence summaries on the board. This activity is a great wrap-up to almost any lesson, enabling students to share and contribute to a larger-scale whole-class summary.

The Biggest Aha Bar Graph

The Biggest Aha Bar Graph allows you to capture what students feel are their most important insights learned and see commonalities among them. Basically, it’s a bar graph constructed using your students’ Biggest Aha Quick-Writes. It allows you to peek into their minds as a group and see what portions of your lesson made the biggest impact on students and what needs further attention.

One Word Summary

One-Word Summaries to allow students to summarize the essence of the content presented that day using just one word. The teacher then circulates around the room asking for explanations or clarifications. This activity is versatile, brief, and can be used without much planning.

The Ripple

In the traditional question-and-answer approach, a teacher poses a question to the class as a whole and a small handful of eager students respond while everyone else remain disengaged. In this “beach ball scenario”, the teacher doesn’t get an accurate assessment of what the others are thinking or what they have learned until it is too late. Calling on an individual student should be a teacher’s last resort when it comes to classroom discussion.

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