Sticky Collaboration

Recently, I visited a 7th grade SDC (Special Day Class) math class and observed students huddled in groups of four passionately discussing variables.  I was intrigued.  I moved a little closer to one group and heard a student say “No, my post-it should be our group summary.”  Another student in the group responded, “But, your answer doesn’t describe what a variable is; all your answer says is an example of solving for a variable. Your answer doesn’t work for my example on my post-it note, so we can’t just use it.”  The productive discussion lead the group to a response that all were happy with, and so one student wrote their group response in their center of their shared paper.

These students were working on what the teacher described Sticky Note Collaboration.  The idea is for the teacher to pose a question for the students to respond to.  (This works best when the question is more of a generalizing a concept idea rather than a ‘how to’ idea.)  Then, the students independently write their response on their post-it note.  Once students have written their response, they move into groups of four.  Each student reads aloud their post-it note and then sticks it to the corner of the group summary paper.  Once all members of the group has shared their post-it, then the group collectively discusses the commonalities of their responses and creates a group response.  After a short time of the groups working together, each group selects a student to read aloud their group summary.   

What I liked about the activity:

Students were using multiple SMPs in this brief 10-15 minute warm-up activity.  By having the student individually create a response, students were being asked to make sense of the prompt (SMP 1).  The students shared ideas and generated a general response and in order for students to do that, they had to critique the reasoning of others (SMP 3).  The students had to be precise with the vocabulary and language of their answer (SMP 6).  All this was done with the teacher providing one high level cognitive demand prompt and a well executed structure of interaction with students.  At no point did the teacher tell them a response to the question.  Instead, the students did all the thinking, comparing, analyzing and reflecting to determine a well constructed answer to a mathematical question.  

Sample Sticky Note Collaboration (7th Grade Math, SDC)