Clarification to this, following a thoughtful query from a list member:

I mentioned a chat forum. This wasn't a live chat facility. It was a discussion 
forum. Each group would elect someone to make notes on what they were talking about, 
then they would submit their notes in a single post when I asked them to, just as I 
was about to rearrange the groups. So all groups submitted their stuff at once, and 
it was easy enough for them to just read the four posts from the other groups before 
starting up again. I didn't explicitly tell them to integrate the stuff from the 
other group's posts into their own discussions; I just wanted it to help give them 
extra insights. It seemed to help!

Dave


-- 
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Language & Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, 
Finland | www.jyu.fi
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
Communications Secretary, BAAL Language Policy group | www.langpol.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://jyu.academia.edu/DaveSayers

On 17/01/2019 09:40, Dave Sayers wrote:
> Hi TeachLingers,
> 
> I'm not sure how original an idea this is, but it worked really nicely, and I haven't 
> actually heard of it used elsewhere, so I thought I'd share...
> 
> Yesterday I had a fairly ordinary workshop activity planned, where students were to 
> discuss in groups a section of a textbook plus two recent media articles illustrating 
> that issue. So far, so conventional. But this being only the second class, I really 
> wanted to encourage them to speak to as many other people in the class as possible, 
> to get to know each other and to be exposed to more views about language in society. 
> I first thought to arrange them into random groups. That's fine but it only means 
> they talk to a few new people.
> 
> Then I had an idea to adapt an activity that I first came up with in 2017 for a 
> professional workshop purely as an introductory exercise - I wrote that up at the 
> time here: https://www.academia.edu/33789696/ (skip to slide 30-34 for info about the 
> group rotation thing). For yesterday's teaching it worked similarly but with less 
> furniture arrangement beforehand! They were all seated already, so I did a pretty 
> normal random group assignment: going round each student and counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 
> (repeat around the class) and sending all the 1s to one corner, all the 2s elsewhere, 
> etc. That's pretty ordinary; it's just the next bit which gave a lot more mileage to 
> this same workshop exercise. I waited till it seemed they were coming to the end of 
> their discussions, asked them to wrap up, and then simply repeated the 1-5 count 
> round the room.  This quickly and simply split each group into new groups, where each 
> individual student was in front of four new people. The new groups discussed the same 
> questions, but they all had loads of new things to say to each other.
> 
> I figured this would only work twice, maybe three times, after which I'd move on to 
> the next exercise; but in the end I did this group rotation four times, and each 
> iteration had a really detailed, focused, and original discussion for about 15 
> minutes. It seemed to just keep working. This was a two hour class! They had just as 
> much to say in each new group, because each time they were talking to new people.
> 
> I didn't ask for written feedback in class but it certainly seemed productive, not 
> just class-padding! I did have other exercises ready to use; this just seemed a 
> genuinely good use of their time - as I said earlier, not least to get them to 
> interact with as many other people in class as possible, in the interests of good 
> dialogue during subsequent classes.
> 
> The other possibly novel aspect was that, as they discussed things, I asked them to 
> write their thoughts into a chat forum that I'd made in the Moodle course page. Then, 
> just after they had moved into their new groups, I asked them to individually read 
> all the threads from the other groups (on their laptops/phones). I repeated that each 
> time the groups changed, and it further helped provide fresh ideas and gave them 
> further insight into their classmates' ideas.
> 
> Well, I hope this is useful to others, and I'd love to hear other list members' 
> workshop activities!
> 
> Dave
> 
> 

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