1. Discussion Points
Before starting a topic, make a statement for the students to
decide whether they agree. If you carefully design the statement it can cause
disagreements and bring out misconceptions. You must go round and listen to
what the groups are saying during their discussion time. Assign groups and
roles if you wish, my favourite role is a silent summariser who sits and listens
to the discussion making notes and then feeds back to the class what their
group thought. You can then go on to teach and practice a skill before coming
back to the discussion point as a plenary to see whether they have changed
their mind.
EXAMPLE: An example might be “angles in any polygon add to
360” which I would ask at the beginning of the lesson, give students no more
than 5 minutes to discuss and get general feedback with a vote of who agrees before
any teaching. I would then teach angle sums in polygons, investigate and
generalise a formula which the students then practice. I would then come back
to the discussion point at the end of the lesson to conclude the learning as a
plenary.
2. Cartoon Concepts
Similar to discussion points, you can have a question or
statement in the middle with several different opinions around the outside (including misconceptions).
The students can then identify which opinions they disagree with quite easily.
It is more difficult for them to pick out and justify who they agree with the
most. You can provide a grid to help structure their discussion and help them
develop their arguments by collecting evidence.
EXAMPLE:
This is an example of a concept cartoon I created to introduce order of operations.
The table was used to help guide and focus the students discussion and help them structure their feedback
to the class. I gave one table per group and whoever had the table was the
‘silent summariser’ who made notes on the group discussion but was not allowed to contribute. The silent summariser was then the only student in the group allowed to feed back at the end.
3. Grouping
Statements or Questions
Give
students statements in groups to organise into three piles: always true,
sometimes true and never true. This promotes discussion and encourages students
to challenge each other’s thinking. Giving a range of different questions and
asking them to group them without giving categories promotes discussion of what
is similar and what is different, sometimes different groups will categorise
them differently. Also asking students to rank statements or questions based on
importance, difficulty, how many marks they think it is out of. Alternatively
asking which is the odd one out, using questions, diagrams or graphs - https://nonexamples.com/ contains some examples
of spotting the odd one out.
4. Non-questions
If you give students
a diagram and ask them “what could the question be?” first, the students list
as many different questions as they can based on the diagram ranging from
obvious up to extremely challenging maybe even impossible questions. I'm always amazed by some of the questions the students ask, often asking some you would never have thought of yourself. Working in
groups they can then explore whether their questions can be answered. If their
question is impossible (or they don't yet have the knowledge or skills to answer it), they can explore what else they would need to know to
be able to answer it. They can then feedback one of their questions (and potentially their answer to that question) to the rest of the class. There are lots of freely available resources, such as http://goalfreeproblems.blogspot.com/
the home of Goal Free Problems but any question can be adapted to be open ended
for discussion by removing the question (usually the final line in an exam
question) and instead writing “what other information can you tell me?”. I’ve
done this as homework, where students have time in lesson to discuss the problem
and make some notes. Then they independently write up on no more than one side
of A4 what their group discussed and what conclusions they came to – this ensured
everyone was part of the discussion and they had to listen to each other.
