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Education

Record of a “speed dating” classroom management exercise

In an education class, we did an exercise called “speed dating.” It really had little to do with dating at all. It was more like you were “dating” a question.

All around the classroom questions were posted on the walls. The class separated into groups of 3 and answered questions posted on the walls. In our groups, we came up with a single best answer to each question through discussion and wrote our answer on the paper posted to the wall with a color pen.

Afterwards, all the groups voted on the best answer to each question by placing a star next to their favorite answer, but not their own answers. For whichever group got the most votes on a question, they “won” that question.

It was like an electoral college system too as there was also a competition to see who would win the most questions. The way it turned out, there was a 3 way tie, each group getting 6 questions.

Another way of scoring would be to take a popular vote, by counting the total number of stars that each group obtained but it worked out for a tie nicely the other way, and every group got extra credit instead of a single group.