Activity Objective

The goal of Pick a Corner: Engaging Students and Encouraging Critical Thinking is to build critical thinking skills by giving students an opportunity to express and support their opinions about a topic or text in an interactive way.

What You Need

Prep Time:

10-15 minutes
- Create signs
- Choose a topic or text
- Generate a list of statements pertaining to the topic or text

Task Time:

20-30 minutes
- Teacher reads a text aloud or introduces a topic
- Teacher reads statements that pertain to the text or topic
- Students move to the sign that expresses their opinion on each statement
- Students discuss their opinions with each other and the class

Materials Required:

Teacher: 
- Signs that say "strongly agree", "agree", "disagree" and "strongly disagree"
- List of statements pertaining to a text or topic
- Text (optional)

What You Do

Teacher Role:

Direct instruction:
- when introducing the activity and during the optional read-aloud

Facilitator:
- as students move to various corners and discuss their rationale with a partner

Student Grouping:

Whole class:
- during the optional read-aloud and as students move to the corners

Pairs:
- while students share their rationale for moving to a particular corner

Assessment Ideas:

- Make anecdotal comments about students' rationales

Quick Tips

Activity Extensions:

- Have students write the rationale for their various opinions as oppose to having them orally explain it to a partner

- Discuss the meaning of the word "opinion" and ways that you could support an opinion

- After reading a text, invite students to generate the statements used in the activity

- To incorporate physical activity, conduct this activity outside or in a gymnasium and have students run, hop or jump to their selected corner
   a.  Increase the speed with which statements are presented so that students are moving around more frequently

Additional Comments:

- When doing activities such as this, work to create an environment where everyone's answers are accepted and appreciated and no one is singled out or criticized for their ideas.
   a.  You may want to have a class discussion in advance about the value of different opinions and how we should respond if someone's opinion is different than ours. 

- This activity can be used to assess students' understanding of concepts introduced in science, history, social studies and other subjects. It can also be used with more fact based statements to tap students' prior knowledge about a construct. 
   a.  For example, before a unit on dolphins, have statements like "Dolphins are mammals." "Dolphins can stay under water for a long time without breathing."

- If desired, you can modify the response options to suit your purpose, for example, having "True/False" questions. 

- This activity is ideal for English language learners because it provides many opportunities for oral expression. 

- This is a good activity to conduct before or after a period of seatwork because it involves a lot of movement and engagement.