Rumors is a great instructional routine to exchange ideas and find similarities and differences. It was developed by Rhonda Bondie.
Strengths of the routine:
- It gets students out of their seats
- everyone has to engage in conversation
- requires students to listen and repeat the ideas of others
- allows many learners to talk at the same time, no one needs to wait for a turn
- you can use the activity to identify patterns and groups of ideas that can be used in further instruction
Here’s how it works:
- Ask learners to write their name and an idea on a post-it note.
- Tell learners that there a lot of rumors going around about _______ (Whatever you choose as the topic for the post-it note)
- Tell learners they are going to spread their rumors by going up to someone, read your post-it note, listen to their post-it note, and then exchange rumors. Then each person finds someone else and does the same thing again. Listen, Tell, Exchange or Tell, Listen, Exchange. Learners should use the name written on the post-it when they share a rumor – “I heard from Sarah that…”
- Allow learners to exchange ideas with as many people as they can in three minutes.
- Stop the rumors and ask one participant to read the rumor they ended up with. Post the rumor on the board of chart paper, and then ask others to post their rumors up next to it if it could be in a group with this one. Ask each learner to read their rumor out loud as they post it.
- Encourage learners to give the group of rumors a name.
- Ask for a different rumor and start a second group, inviting learners to add similar ideas the way you did for the first group. Brainstorm a name for the new group of ideas.
- Continue adding groups until all rumors are collected.
- Discuss what our rumors may tell us about our learning, questions, ourselves.
Possible Extensions:
- Birds of a Feather: Birds of a feather can flock together – for this activity learners group the ideas by common themes.
- Diversity Makes Us Stronger: Pull one post-it from each of the different groups and form a new mixed group idea. Continue to pull one from each group until all groups have people in it whose initial response was diverse.
