20
questions was always the game my family played on long car rides. There were
only three of us, so the game tended to go quickly. As much as I love the game,
it never struck me as lending itself to a full class activity.
The version
of the game we played in class would not be something I think I would play
early in the year, it was a bit high risk, as my mentor teacher would say. We
set the parameters that the person answering was allowed to lie up to two times
and did not have to admit to having lied until halfway through the questioning.
The risk, however, was in working as a team.
The
students asking questions all had to work as a team. Learning that kind of
collaboration is quite possibly one of the most important things you learn in
school. To ask a question, we had to discuss and critique it, we had to think
as a group about what we really know and what information could be wrong, and
we had to come to an agreement on what we would ask and how we would phrase it.
That
process takes a lot of thought and a lot of patience. To do this in class, the
students would have to be able to take turns speaking, feel comfortable enough
to state thoughts openly, be able to take criticism, and sit back and be open
to other ideas. That’s enough to drive a high school student crazy.
What they
get out of it, however, has the potential to be a great tool. Those skills are
necessary for a good education and for being a member of a community. As an
added bonus, the game is a pretty fun method for practicing it.
Thanks for sharing about the 20 Questions Game! In the blur that was this past week, I had already pushed it to the corners of my mind, which is a scary place to be these days if you're a new idea! Though I did not play the game with the Maize cohort, I felt like you summed up well the experience that we all had as we worked to figure out who Jeff was thinking about!
ReplyDeleteI was surprised as to how much work it took for us to communicate our ideas and to move forward on an idea together. We speak about collaboration so often that I have forgotten how challenging it can be to bring so many different perspectives together into a common understanding and subsequent action. But what an enriching experience!
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on the game and its potential utility for your own classroom! I'm going to go write a note to myself (or just copy your blog entry) so I don't let this lesson slip from view again!
I also enjoyed your points about collaboration. This 20 questions gamed made me realize how much we are asking of our students when we ask them to work together. Generally they will not be working a group of 20 opinionated adults (this is not a bad thing, just not something our students will deal with), but they will be working with people they don't get along with or don't agree with and that can be a major challenge. That can also be a major learning opportunity. I have found in my past experience with groups that if I let myself be open to hearing other people's idea I learn MUCH more!!
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you! I think it would be incredibly overwhelming to a high school student to get into the "discussions" we had in class. I think that instead of discussing the questions the class got into a frenzy a couple of times and it was more of an argument than anything else. I think that if we were to do the exercise again it might be a good idea to have a rule about raising our hands. It got a little aggressive for me personally but overall I think it was a good learning experience for all of us.
ReplyDeleteYou guys make a really good point and I think I would have to qualify this game as a high-risk activity. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteIt might be very helpful for practice with the debate team, mock trial, model UN, or AP courses and depending on how well you know your class, it's something you could work up to later in the year like hug greetings.
You also mentioned what you might change if we got to play again. That is a great learning experience right there. This could certainly be a game you play a few times with your class and see how strategies evolve, changes in how they treat each other, how they think differently, and how much faster they can win.
I'd certainly like to play again.
It's fun to sit back a few weeks later and recall this activity. I absolutely agree that this was high risk. We were in a chaotic space (in that the tables and chairs were not in any order or pattern) and we had just been in small groups looking at software. Then we were told, as a large group, to solve something. We had sidebar conversations, arguments about HOW to present our 20 questions and even debated the order in which order they should be asked. An interesting thing that I haven't really thought about until now is that when the person guessed the correct answer, I didn't know it for a few minutes and kept discussing the possibilities with the folks around me. It was that chaotic that I didn't hear the correct guess! I wonder what that kind of activity would be like with small groups working together to strategize the questions...
ReplyDeleteWait, someone guessed the correct answer? I apparently didn't notice either.
DeleteI recently met with my potential mentor teacher for the Fall. One of the extracurriculars she coaches is Mock Trial. She was telling me about how competitive and hardworking the kids were and I think this kind of game might be perfect for a group of kids like that. They have to learn to work as a team, not to mention learn to ask questions and react to the answers. I definitely think we could find some applications for this game and the students could get a lot out of it.
Random thought...I wonder how the dynamics would change if one of the two "lies" he could use was whether he'd used a lie...I think that might just make the moderator just a bit further from reliable and make the activity just a bit tougher (or impossible).
ReplyDeleteI agree...nothing early in the year, but quite a cool idea for later.