Rally Robin

AITSL STANDARD :3.3 – Use teaching strategies

Select and use relevant teaching strategies to develop knowledge, skills, problem solving and critical and creative thinking.

---

The Situation

You want your students to develop a list of ideas or responses.

The Solution

When writing a narrative, it is beneficial that students write a list of adjectives to complement their writing.

When completing a film study, it is engaging to get students list all the Pixar films, films start with I or S (It is a fun to get students to talk about films even if it doesn’t contribute directly to their learning).

When observing a image, it is wise to get students to list objects such as the See, Think Wonder strategy.

Listing is a low order task, but vocabulary is the foundation of writing and good writing requires a bank of words. Getting students to list their initial ideas or words allows them to generate more complex ideas.

A RallyRobin is an effective cooperative learning activity that you can employ to engage your students. It can function much like a game, as it relies upon a pair to generate as many responses as possible under a particular time limit – usually no more than 1 minute.

Here are the instructions for RallyRobin:

1. Teacher asks a question that requires multiple answers, such as a list. Teacher provides time limit (1 minute).
2. Partner A responds first.
3. Partner B rallies an answer.
4. Repeat the process until time is up. Teacher calls STOP!

You can add more competition to the above instructions. You may award a prize for the most responses. Or a pseudo consequence for the least amount of ideas (You will need to clean my car!) – something silly and nonthreatening.