Group Work - 'Runners and Writers'

Another idea I used at ISSOS was a group task I had seen in Paul Ginnis' Teacher's Toolkit where students work in groups to recreate a poster or info graphic.

I had placed another large poster, this time from a broadsheet newspaper, in the corridor outside my classroom. I then got the class into 4 teams of 4 using a box of folded up names of each member of the class. When students were in their teams of 4 I got them to decide which one of them would be the 'writer'. The 'writer' would be the person who had to draw/write the information that the others would tell them. The remaining 3 people in each team were the 'runners'. These people had the job of 'running' into the corridor to look at the poster, remember the information on it and then tell the writer in the classroom what info was on it, where and what to draw/write. The groups were given about 20-30 minutes to try and recreate the poster in the corridor.

This task involved teams communicating with each other extremely well to get across the information needed.

In addition to the roles each member of the groups had there were some rules they had to abide by. Only the writer could write/draw on the A3 piece of paper they were given. The 'runners' could not draw or write anything. The 'writer' was not allowed to go into the corridor to look at the poster. The 'runners' were not allowed to take a picture of the poster, they could only use their memories. Only 1 'runner' from each team was allowed in the corridor at any one time and they must 'tag' another member of their team when back in the classroom to allow them to take their turn. All members of the team were allowed to talk to one another and this was where the main element of team work came in as  all the 'runners' after seeing the poster could speak with each other and the 'writer' to check they had recreated the poster as accurately as possible!

The tasks worked really well with teams doing an amazing job at recreating the poster - some of the drawings were phenomenal, based on the fact that the 'writer' literally had only their peers descriptions to go by!