The educator makes a statement and the students move to a part of the room that represents their view, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Students at each point are invited to share their reasoning.
Instructions
- Display the statement or question on the screen or read it out loud. Give students a moment to think about their answer and their reasoning.
- Ask students to move to the point on the line/part of the room that represents their choice.
- In each answer group, ask students to discuss the rationale for their answer selection for 3-5 minutes. Ask students to discuss is groups of 2-3 if many students choose the same point.
- Ask a few students from each answer group to summarise key ideas.
Resources
A statement or a question that can have an open-ended response and more than one correct answer.
Variations
- Make it ‘Four Corners’: Provide four answer choices with each corner of the room representing an answer. Ask students to pick a corner instead of lining up. This may work better if the answers to a question are disparate rather than on a scale.
- Make it a mini debate: Rather than simply sharing their view, students try to convince the students in other groups to change their mind. At any point, students are free to move to another group if they hear something that changes their mind.
- Make it online: If having students physically moving around the room isn’t feasible, a version of the activity could be created online using an option such as Miro, where students could hover their cursor on a line to indicate where they “stand”. Rather than having a discussion in the group, the educator could call on volunteers from each group to share their rationale with the class.