A new routine came into our lives and classrooms about a year ago during an inspirational professional learning session - thank you inquiry gurus, Jess Vance and Trevor Mackenzie - and it’s been a game changer!
GOGO stands for Give One Get One, and it is a super simple format for sharing ideas, opinions, questions, observations… just use your imagination and you’ll find a way to make it work for you.
All you need to do is get your learners moving around the room, and on a signal, they pair up (allow a trio if you’ve got an odd number, that’s fine!). Then they exchange one piece of information with each other and when you signal again, they can move on. Repeat until they have the information or the new ideas they need!
It’s brilliantly adaptable to any learning area and any age group. Naomi used a version of it to introduce a new project with her upper primary class –
We are working on maps so each student started off with an example of a map. We had gathered a really diverse set of examples: fictional maps, bus maps, mud maps, snorkel trail maps, land use maps, festival site maps, tourist maps…
For the GOGO, I asked students to describe one thing they noticed about their own map to each other. Then as an extra challenge, they needed to find one thing that their maps had in common. In a short amount of time the whole class had experienced lots of examples of maps in an engaging and fun way and could now link it to their own learning in the session to come.
Shona also used the GOGO method with her year twos in a session that helped them understand the difference between skinny and juicy questions -
The year two class I was working with were taking part in a research project on oceans and needed to figure out the questions they wanted to ask about their chosen sea creature. We wanted them to move past the closed, skinny questions and get into the realm of juicy, open-ended ones to stimulate their inquisitiveness.
I used the GOGO method as a way of helping the class to swap questions and ideas by asking them to write four of their best questions on post-it notes (one on each note). On my signal, they would stop and look at the questions with a partner and then swap one of theirs for one they liked of their classmates.
They did this four times until all the notes were swapped and we then came back together as a class and asked everyone to classify them on the wall under juicy and skinny and reinforce the concept. It was a great way for all the kids to get new ideas for their projects and they loved the opportunity to talk to each other and get out of their seat to learn.
So, there you have it… the movement, the multiple perspectives, the simplicity - all this makes GOGO an absolute winner.
Can you see how you could use this in your classroom? Do you have other routines like this one to share? Tell us all about it in the comments below.
And if you liked this idea and want to try new strategies in the classroom to freshen things up, download our latest pdf freebie and improve your learner's creative thinking skills today!
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