Mingles - get students talking to one another

 Have you ever been on a training session or team building activity where the organisers have kicked things off with an ice-breaking activity called Find someone who... ? You know, the one where you have to talk to the other participants to find out who has a tattoo, who has back-packed around Australia, who can play guitar. (Tutors, this is great beginning of the year activity, especially if you have vertical tutor groups.) Anyway, this is basically a version of that. I call it a mingle; it could be called an information exchange. Maybe you know it by another name.

Let's say you are planning a lesson and have to give the students a huge amount of information. You could give them a hand out, which they will promptly not read or simple lose; you could dictate it and have them take notes (don't get me wrong - there's a place for this) or you could try a mingle. 

Give each student a list of questions and a piece of information. That piece of information answers ONE of the questions. The students now need to mingle to find someone who can answer one of the other questions: once done, they'll need to move on and talk to others. It gets them out of their seats, moving around, waking them up, and talking to members of the class that they might not normally speak to. As they need to cooperate to complete the task, it's great for team building. It also teaches students to be inquirers, learning that they sometimes need to ask to find out the information they need, rather than just wait passively for teachers to spoon feed it to them. 

(As a language teacher, I model, then praise and reward students who are correctly using the target language: otherwise they'll just copy off one another, rather than exchange information verbally.) 

What do I use this for? Well, as it does take some setting up on the teacher's part, I use it for information I will need to give out every year (thus, once I have made the resource once, I can reuse it the following year). Otherwise dull but fairly vital topics like exam formats are a good one (e.g. How many questions are there? How long is the exam? What do I need to revise? How many marks are there for X?)

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