In an effort to put my students in the driver seat of our Geometry Exam review, and to help them see the connections of what we’ve studied this year, I tried a new review format that mimicked much of the design thinking activities I’ve engaged in, in the past. In advance of our week-long review period, I asked my students to make a list of everything we learned this year.  Then, on the first day of review I divided them into four groups and give each group a large board and lots of sticky notes.  They had 5 minutes to get everything they wrote down on the board (one concept per sticky note). The one rule throughout the process was that they could never refer to a chapter or section. They couldn’t say, “Section 4.3,” for example. They had to know what CONCEPT was covered in that chapter and use real math vocabulary as opposed to artificial chapters and sectioning. See video here.

Then all groups rotated.  Each group ended up at another group’s board full of stickies and they were instructed to group and organize them into larger topics, much like we’ve done with our design thinking work this year.  Again they had five minutes. See video here.

Then they all rotated again. For this round they could add any stickies that were missing and they were also encouraged to make arrows connecting stickies to multiple topics. See video here.

Finally they rotated again for five minutes with the same instructions. See video here.

At the end they went back to their original board and digested what was in front of them. See final boards here, here, here and here.


I chose to do this for the following reasons:

• So often our teaching, reviews and even assessments are organized by chapter.  In an effort to make sure we cover everything, our reviews and tests follow the chapters of the textbook: Two questions from chapter 1, then a few from chapter 2 and so on and so forth.  A predictable set of unrelated problems where a student might be able to (and a teacher definitely could) draw the lines where one chapter ends and another begins. Instead, I wanted these students to see the interconnectedness between the CONCEPTS (not chapters) we had learned.
• I wanted them to see topics written by their peers that perhaps they didn’t think about.
• I wanted them to be at the center of the review process.  Instead of me providing the review content, they had to generate it.