Reading Together
Objective
Read with understanding – and share the understanding with other students.
Requirements
- Time: depends on the complexity of the reading selections and questions. Plan for at least five minutes for each 3-minute game plus time to debrief between games.
- Number of Players: 3 or more — arrange the players in pairs or teams of 3 or 4.
- Age range: Old enough to write answers to questions.
- Space: Desk activity with student partners or online with breakout rooms.
- Equipment: reading selections, open-ended questions, writing supplies, timer, scoring rubric. Optional: EnTeam score sheets clarify the rotation and scores.
Set Up
- Teacher picks several reading selections and at least two open-ended questions for each selection.
- The reading selections should be comparable in length and reading level. (For example, three paragraphs from a story or chapter)
- The ideal questions are open-ended and have many valid answers.
- Students form teams with three or four students per team.
- Students interview each other and write their partner’s answer to the questions.
- If you use the EnTeam scoresheet, students write their names on the score sheet for their team.
- Students sit beside their teammate:
- In teams of four students, A starts with B, and C starts with D.
- In teams of three students, A starts with B, and C works solo.
How to Play
1. Give the students time to read the first selection and work together in pairs to write their partner’s answers to the open-ended questions for that selection. Solo students work alone to answer their questions.
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- Teammates may talk together and help each other.
- Both partners write at least one of their partner’s answers to the first question before they work on the second question.
2. After the time is up, students record their scores and share their answers.
- Score each answer separately according to the rubric.
- In teams of three, the score for the solo person is based on their individual work.
3. Game 2: Change partners and repeat steps 1 and 2 with new partners.
- In teams of 4 students, A works with C, and B with D.
- In teams of 3 students, A works with C, and B works solo.
4. Game 3: Change partners and repeat steps 1 and 2 with new partners.
- In teams of 4 students, A works with D, and B with C.
- In teams of 3 students, B works with C, and A works solo.
5. Debrief
- Reflect with questions: What happened? So what? Now what?
Rules for Players in 3-minute Games
Objective: Work with teammates to find as many answers to questions as you can.
Set up:
Your teacher will give you reading selections, open-ended questions, and a scoring rubric.
- You and your teammates read one selection. You look for answers to open-ended questions.
- You interview your teammate and only write the answers your teammate gives to the questions.
- When time is up, you score the answers using the rubric.
Rules:
- Each game has a different reading selection.
- Everyone starts writing at the same time.
- You may only write what your partner says to you. (If you are a solo player, you must write the ideas that come to you.)
- Partners may not write about a second question until both have written at least one answer to the first question.
- The time limit for writing each game is three minutes.
- If you are writing a sentence when the time is up, you may finish that sentence (but not start a new sentence).
- You use your teachers’ scoring rubric to score the answers.
Examples
If your reading selections are about a news report or a science experiment, the open-ended questions might be:
- What did you learn?
- Why is the news important?
- What else would you like to know?
If your reading selections are descriptions of three characters, your open-ended questions for the first person might be:
- What have you learned about the first person?
- What more could be helpful to know about this person?
- How is this person different from you and similar to you?
If a reading selection is about the Civil War, your open-ended questions might be:
- What might have prevented the war?
- How do you think people felt about the war when it started?
Sample rubric
Give students a rubric for scoring answers with an example of how you want them to score a good answer and an example for scoring a weak answer.
Each answer can earn up to 4 points:
The rubric you use depends on your learning objectives.
Variations on scoring
- Partners score one point for each pair of valid answers with two authors.
- For example, if A writes four answers and B writes one answer, the score for both A and B is one, because they have one pair of answers with two authors.
- The purpose of this scoring is to avoid one player doing most of the work.
- Teams score each other’s work.
- Each team passes their written answers to another team.
- Each team fills out the rubric for the other team’s answers.
- Return papers to the owners.
- Simplify scoring by just counting the number of answers.
Debrief Questions
The purpose of debriefing is to develop strategies that will improve your performance and to recognize how these lessons apply to everyday life. To facilitate a successful debrief, facilitators must observe participants and ask engaging questions that spark thoughtful reflection. If we don’t debrief, we don’t learn!
What happened?
What did you see? What did you hear? What was the score?
What worked? What didn’t work?
How did people feel? What issue(s) came up? What issue(s) remain?
So what?
What did we learn?
How does this experience relate to other experiences?
Why are we doing this? How is it relevant to us?
Now what?
How could we improve our score in this activity?
How can we work together better?
How could we apply lessons learned outside of the game?
Digging Deeper
- Did anyone feel reluctant to share strategies?
- Why? Are you still in a win-lose mindset?
- If we are trying to improve collective achievement, who are you benefitting when you withhold strategies from other teams?
