Gallery Walk
Materials
For this activity, you need several sheets of large newsprint paper or Post-Its and thick magic markers in various colors. They will be posted around the room with enough space between so participants can gather at them.
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"The Gallery Walk works best with highly charged, even objectionable, statements or polemics that get the participants to reveal their own feelings and thoughts..." |
Procedure
Participants respond to statements written on the newsprint. Each page will then contain numerous responses of varying lengths. They can even respond to the responses.
They take the "gallery walk" throughout the activity as they choose which ones they want to respond to, unless they have time to respond to all of them. When the time is up for writing responses, participants then walk around, as if in a gallery, and read the statements and responses. Discussion of the activity follows.
The Gallery Walk works best with highly charged, even objectionable, statements or polemics that get the participants to reveal their own feelings and thoughts about the topic under exploration. These statements can be chosen by the session leaders in advance, or by the participants that day. The statements can come from their own writing or from readings. The topics can range from school policies most people disagree with, assessment issues, or even myths about literacy. The responses to the statements are usually informal. The responses can then be typed up and referred to at another session.
One version of this activity
On Teaching Responsibilities
Introduction and Writing Prompt
The idea is to start opening up to other points of view: One of our hopes in participating in these seminars is to use the time to imagine alternatives to our current work and to begin to effect some kind of change where we work. One step in that process is to be reflective — to get meta, if you will — about our work. We hope, then, that we will not only think hard about the work we currently do as teachers, but also about the work we WANT to do. To that end, we offer this writing prompt:
Where does our responsibility lie as teachers and what is the nature of that responsibility? Is it with/for students (who are they to become, workers, whole people, critical citizens?) Tests? A department? A curriculum? An institution? (5 min)
Polemics/Statements
(55 min) — Gallery walk and talk. Let us look at how others represent the responsibility of teachers.
Seminar Leaders Response
"[The goal here was to do] some writing on how we understand our responsibilities as teachers. This was followed by a gallery walk where small groups read quotes on a large post-it, and responded to it, rotated and responded to both the quote and the first response, rotated again and responded to the quote and the two responses, etc."
Participant Responses
"I really enjoyed the gallery walk — something I had never done before. It balances small group discussion with the sense of the large group nicely. It also helped us to consider the institutional context of our teaching."
"I think some of the 'quotes' were a bit long and complex to be able to deal with in the short amount of time the 'gallery walk' permits."
"I loved the gallery walk and plan to implement this in my classroom. It is such an excellent and provocative way for students to respond in a variety of ways: responding, interpreting, criticizing."