 the name of a technique that they would feel confident about discussing. This encourages students of all abilities to reflect on what they already know, and mentally prepares them with an idea or concept that they will be able to relate to whatever idea is drawn from the box.
- Before the activity, write down some differentiated challenges on the whiteboard to complement the game. During the discussion periods, students must choose one of the challenges and respond to it using whatever post-it comes out of the box as a launching pad (be sure to extend the discussion period to factor in the extra “thinking time” needed here).
For the poetry lesson outlined above, a task for less-confident students might be: “Identify ways in which the post-it note reflects the theme of Isolation”. A task for students who require more of a challenge might be: “Analyse the contents of the post-it note in relation to three different structural features of the poem”.