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…

Problem-Solving Carousel

Each station has a different multi-step problem written on a large whiteboard or piece of chart paper. Groups are assigned to a station and begin working together to solve the problem written there. Time is called…

Value Lines – Where do I Stand?

This strategy is a blend of Bend the Line and Philosophical Chairs that has been adapted to promote team building and exploration of the deeper reasoning underlying diverse views. Students are given a provocative statement or claim and must decide to what degree they agree or disagree with it…

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!

5 Ways to Turn a Worksheet into a Collaborative Critical Thinking Activity

Here are 5 no prep ways you can turn just about any lower level thinking or rote practice worksheet (like a multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank quiz, or math drill workbook page) into an activity that’s collaborative and includes higher level thinking skills. The best part? The activities are engaging for kids and FUN.

Make It Stick: 4 Powerful Teaching Strategies Based on the Science of Learning

Over the past few decades, cognitive scientists have been trying to pinpoint exactly which activities work best for storing concepts in long-term memory. Until now we haven’t gone very deep into what these strategies look like in the classroom…

Forced Choice Partners (Would You Rather…?)

This activity can be used as an icebreaker or as a way to move students into pairs or small groups for content-related discussion. The teacher asks (or projects) a question on a light or funny topic that forces students to select one of two options…

Discussion Warm-Ups

Most students just don’t respond well to walking into class and kicking off a discussion cold-turkey. When you ask a question first thing, silence and awkward eye contact avoidance is most likely all you will get…

Pop-Up Debates

Pop-up Debate is a method for managing and facilitating in-class debates; it is easily modifiable for other speaking scenarios, such as discussions or toasts.
Students use assigned text(s), logic, and/or course content to respond to a debatable prompt and their peers’ arguments using the rules below. Every student speaks 1+ times, depending on time constraints. These limits are set by the teacher. To speak, students simply “pop up” at their desks and talk. First person to speak has the floor. When multiple students pop up, teach them to politely yield the floor. Argument is a collaborative endeavor, and collaboration isn’t a pointed finger and, “Sit down, I was up first.”

What’s It Really About Carousel

“What’s It Really About?” Carousel What It Is This activity is similar to the Debate Team Carousel except that it has only three rounds. It works well when students need to analyze content that is rich with themes, implications, inferences, and deeper purposes. How It Works Ask students to respond to the first box by trying to […]

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. 

1, 2, 3 O’Clock

This wrap-up technique allows you to quickly review three important questions by having students respond to and discuss them with a designated classmate. It can be modified to include more or fewer questions, depending on the amount of time you have.

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.

IQ Cards (Insight & Question)

IQ Cards allow all students to share two things: an insight (I) and a question (Q). They also allow all students to read one another’s insights and questions in a collaborative final step. These work well wtih  difficult-to-test concepts that are measured by bigger-picture understandings. Examples might include historical conflicts and inequities, human responsibility, climate change, conservation, and controversial readings. 

Debate Team Carousel

Debate Team Carousel is an activity in which students debate a position from various angles as prompted on a template. It allows students to see various aspects of an issue and consider what the opposing and supporting arguments for a certain position might be. 

Confer, Compare, and Clarify

This activity allows students to read each other’s notes, make comparisons, and add their own notes. This gives them the opportunity to pick up tips by seeing how their peers take notes. It also allows them time to reflect on the content, compare understandings with their peers, and ask questions that can be the difference between comprehensions and lack of comprehension.

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.