Part of a short series of posts discussing activities, strategies, or materials that have worked for me in my teaching. Maybe they can work for you, too…
The Thing:
A “Value Line” set-up day
The “value line” is an activity I learned in a workshop years ago. You give students statements to rank their agreement with on some scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 10) with one end being “strongly agree” and the other being “strongly disagree.” Easy enough. But then they have to embody the rankings by standing in a line by number for each statement. As each number explains its stance, students are allowed to move in line.
On its face, this is a version of the ranking sort of thing I wrote about in another post – so a good way to engage opinion-based discussion.
The unique thing here, though, is that I sometimes use these the day we start a new unit of a course. The statements students are given are ones that have discussion value on their own but also (though they don’t know it yet) set up what’s coming later in the unit. Thus, for a literature class where I know we have stories coming up dealing with media, one statement might be “Modern technology helps people stay connected.” Or, starting a unit on contemporary religious life in America, a statement might be “Religion has caused more problems than it has solved in the last 50 years.”
After the value line day, students are instructed to keep the sheet of statements. I often ask, on later days, which ones they think are relevant – and if what we read/studied/talked about changed their mind.
Why It Works:
1 – Options, again.
Repeat here, to some degree, all the things I wrote about ranking exercises in general. Students have options to choose from, there is no one right answer, all that is needed is a considered opinion, and so on. And there’s a debate aspect. Watching students move around as their classmates talk is fun, and means they’re thinking.
2 – It’s a “free” day that’s not, really.
Part of the good news of this exercise is that there’s no advance reading or other homework. Our focus is just on the statements I provide. I’ve found students welcome this, since it lets them discuss something that is not a text or a film or a theory. They can bring their own experiences in, and usually do. It feels like a “break” from class content. Except that, from my point of view, it’s not: these general statements are laying groundwork for the issues we will bring to or find in specific materials later. That’s not an emphasized part of the activity, though, so it feels lower-stakes.
The payoff does work – students enjoy making the later-class connections, and sometimes surprise me by making a case for a statement/reading relationship I had not thought about.
3 – It’s physical.
Don’t underestimate the value of a get-up-and-move day when so much of what college courses do is about the mind. This is something that’s actually different. And, since they have to stand somewhere, no one can hide or hedge their opinion. They have to literally take a stand on the issue. For students who are visual learners, it’s great to actually see how people line up on a statement. Sometimes we stop to discuss what “evenness” or “one-sidedness” actually looks like, and if it’s surprising.
A bonus: I often go sit at a desk while the students line up in the front of the room. After a few statement-lines, someone inevitably starts grumbling about having to stand up so much. At that point, I gently (if slyly) remind them that most other days, they sit while I stand the whole time! So this can be also just a bit of an empathy exercise…
Brantley Craig 