What It Is
Ranking is an activity that requires your students to analyze components of the concepts that you are teaching and then justify their reasons for assigning rankings. It can be done on the spot, or it can be carefully planned to allow for more thorough analysis. For example, after teaching about the causes of the American Revolution, a teacher might list the events studied and ask the students to rank them in order of most important to least important in leading to the American Revolution.
Ranking can also be used to help students synthesize and analyze what they have learned. For example, if you are teaching about the moon and space travel, you might provide students with a list of 15 random items and have them work in small groups to rank the objects they would take based on each item’s usefulness if students were going to travel to the surface of the moon.
How It Works
- Select items, steps, events, descriptive paragraphs, or other things that can be analyzed or ranked within your unit or lesson.
- Ask students to rank them according to specified criteria.
- Ask students to provide a justification for the way they chose to rank their concepts.
- If students are working on their own, allow them to Pair-Share or Network regarding how they ranked items and how they justified their rankings. Allow them to process what their peers shared and to change the order of their rankings if they’ve had a change of heart based on new information.
How to Ensure Higher-Order Thinking
To ensure higher-order thinking, always require that students justify the reasoning behind their rankings. Ranking, and the justification of rankings, requires that student review and then analyze learned concepts together, a higher-order thinking process. Students have to understand concepts beyond the literal in order to effectively justify their rankings.
Consider polling the class or creating a class bar graph of ranked concepts. Use the results as a spin-off for small group discussions and then a whole-class debriefing.
Source
Himmele P., and Himmele, W. Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner. ASCD, 2017, pp.53-56.