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. 

Starting with group brainstorming is not an effective strategy either. Research tells us that free-flowing group brainstorming can actually stifle creativity. When students are working in groups, each idea that is posed ends up setting a course for similar ideas to be pursued, and inhibits the ability for individual group members to entertain dissimilar, or even better, ideas. Brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. Not only are their more ideas, but the ideas are also of higher quality.  

A more effective approach is called The Ripple. Rippling begins with every student responding individually to a prompt, then sharing the response in pairs or small groups, followed by volunteers sharing it with the whole class.  This can be done in a variety of ways such as Quick-Writes, Quick-Draws, Chalkboard Splashes, etc.  

Individual reflection time is important for all students, even if it’s only two minutes long. It enables students to bring something of value to the group. Not only does this keep each student accountable to processing higher-order prompts, but it also enriches the groups’ experiences by increasing the diversity of the ideas presented and the quality of the groups’ refinement of those ideas.  

In addition, allowing students time to individually collect and record their thoughts, and then rippling outward with pair-shares of small group discussions before bringing them to the whole class provides students with the security of having already met with success. The Ripple is beneficial for all students, especially English language learners, socially tentative students, and students with certain special needs.