My 6th and 7th-grade 21st Century Skills classes were very excited to hear the directions when they saw on the daily agenda, 1) Stump Your Partner activity. The goal of this activity is for each student to create a tough question based on the recent class content that they then ask a classmate. This is a way for students to take ownership of reviewing important material from class.
I used the Stump Your Partner to review the Google Applied Digital Skills units we had been working on. My 6th-graders used the Plan an Event module which focused on the use of Google Docs and Drawings, as well as, Google Calendar, Gmail, Sheets, and Sites. My 7th-graders used the Guide to an Area curriculum which focused on Google Sheets, Search, and Maps.
6th-Grade Directions 7th-Grade Directions
I would definitely use this activity again. Many of the students really liked the competitive aspect of the activity with attempting to stump their partner. My favorite part of this activity is that it 1) made the students think about a skill they learned in G-Suite, 2) write a clear description of what their partner needed to do, and then they had to 3) try to accomplish the task their partner wrote. Since I modified this discussion tool to be skill based, I could have had them rotate and try one or two more tasks. I love that this review was created by the students. I did ask students to show their partner how to complete the task if they didn’t know how so that they could learn the skill. This activity could be modified to fit any grade level and subject area.
Overall, the students seemed to enjoy the Stump Your Partner activity. The Google Form responses showed that only 8% of my 6th-graders and 16% of 7th-graders did not like the activity. This activity should have been more challenging for my 7th-graders because their module only used Google Sheets and Maps compared to the 6th-graders who used six different G-Suite applications. Part of what the 7th-graders did in Google Sheets involved coding a sidebar and I did not allow them to use the coding as part of this activity because I did not feel it was fair for students to be asked to demonstrate this very challenging skill after only practicing it one time in class so far. I am pleased with how the lesson went and how engaged most of the students were in writing their own task and completing the task their partner created. I was amazed at the wide variety of questions the students asked which was very encouraging to see. I would definitely utilize this strategy again in the future. Are you ready to accept the challenge? How can you employ this strategy in your classroom?
“Access the Applied Digital Skills Curriculum – Google Applied Digital Skills.” Google, Google, applieddigitalskills.withgoogle.com/c/en/curriculum.html.
“Examples of Collaborative Learning or Group Work Activities | Center for Teaching Innovation.” Getting Started with Active Learning Techniques | Center for Teaching Innovation, teaching.cornell.edu/resource/examples-collaborative-learning-or-group-work-activities.