Rumors

In this video we see students exchanging ideas through the Rumors routine in the high school setting. The teacher, Marvin, is ringing a bell whenever he sees a “high” quality exchange – meaning that students both read and listened to each other’s rumor before moving on to a new partner. The students have the directions on one side of their paper and their answer on the other side of the paper.

Instructional Goal:  Exchange ideas to find similarities and differences

Print: Rumors Directions |  Rumors PowerPoint

Strengths of this routine:

• gets learners on their feet
• everyone has to engage in conversation
• requires students to listen and repeat the ideas of others
• allows many learners to talk at the same time, no waiting for a turn
• patterns or groupings may be used to further instruction

 Starting Position

1. Ask learners to jot down their name and an idea on a post-it-note or small piece of paper. For example:
   • note three questions, put a star next to the most urgent to needs answering
   • sum-up what they are feeling in a word
   • identify their next step for implementing a new idea
   • list one strategy they will use to study this topic
   • Solve a math problem on the front and write the steps used on the back

Note: Use only ONE idea at a time.

Action Pattern – Listen, Say, Exchange

2. Invite learners to join you in an open space with their completed post-it-note.
3. Tell learners there are a lot of rumors going around about “(whatever the topic was for the post-it-note”). Ask learners, what they know about rumors (they spread quickly and people repeat what they heard from other people).
4. Tell learners that we are going to spread our rumors by going up to someone, reading our post it note, listening to their post-it-note, and then exchanging rumors. Then each person goes up to another person and does the same thing again, Listen, Say, Exchange, or Say, Listen Exchange. Learners can use the name written on the post-it-note when they tell a rumor – “I heard from Debbie that….”.
5. Allow learners to exchange ideas with as many people as possible in 3 minutes.

Reflect

6. 

   Protein Synthesis Rumors – Organization

   Stop the rumors. Ask one participant to read the rumor that they ended up with out loud. Post the rumor on a white board or chart paper and then ask others to post their rumor next to it if it could be in a group with this one. Ask learners to read their rumor out loud as they post them in a group.

7. Encourage learners to give the group of rumors a name.
8. Ask for a very different rumor – and start a second group. Invite others to post similar rumors to make a second group and brainstorm a name for the new group of rumors.
9. Continue adding groups until all rumors are collected.
10. Discuss what our rumors may tell us about our learning, questions, ourselves.

Return

Ask students to return to their initial thinking to consider how learning in class has changed or confirmed their thinking.

Use to Differentiate Instruction

1. Birds of a Feather can Flock Together: the rumors are now grouped by common themes. So, the people can gather to further talk about the ideas by the groupings of their post-it-notes.
2. Diversity Makes Us Stronger: You can pull one post-it-note from each of the different groupings to form a new mixed idea group. Continue to pull one from each group until all groups have people whose initial response was diverse.