Small Group Exercise: The 20-Step Process

This train is impressed by the theatre sport The Machine, the place college students work collectively to create components of a manufacturing facility machine with repeated actions and sound. In The 20-Step Process, we take this a step additional by making a easy activity comically sophisticated.

This train challenges small teams of scholars to assume critically, drawback remedy, and create and execute a plan. It’s additionally a inventive problem — college students can current their course of in quite a lot of efficiency kinds.

Instructions:

1. Divide college students into small teams of three–4.

2. Assign every group an on a regular basis activity, akin to making a peanut butter sandwich, brushing their enamel, or filling up the automobile with gasoline. If you want some assist with duties, our out of doors immediate and food-related immediate lists are stuffed with motion concepts.

3. In their teams, have college students write out a listing of 20 steps — no extra and no much less — to finish the duty. For instance, making a peanut butter sandwich isn’t merely opening a jar of peanut butter and utilizing a knife to unfold it on bread. It would possibly contain finding a magical pig to smell out a peanut plant, digging up the peanuts, deciding on solely the peanuts with a selected set of measurements, washing the peanuts with particular cleaning soap, extracting the peanuts from their shells, crushing the peanuts right into a paste, including salt to the paste, heating the combination over a fireplace that’s precisely 348 levels… and so forth for 20 steps, with the twentieth step being the completion of the sandwich.

The steps might be as foolish and fanciful as the scholars want, so long as there are 20 steps — no extra, no much less. If college students have issue determining the steps, they could wish to strive working backwards from the ultimate step, or breaking down every a part of the duty into ridiculously small micro-tasks.

4. Once they’ve created the checklist, college students will work out a option to current it as a efficiency. Some concepts would possibly embrace:

• Create a collection of 20 tableau scenes (one for every step).
• Mime the 20 steps.
• Do an interpretive dance of the 20 steps whereas a narrator describes the motion.
• Present the checklist within the fashion of a step-by-step educational video.
• Turn the checklist right into a poem or tune.
• Create a comedy scene wherein a instructor reveals their college students how you can do the duty utilizing the 20 steps, or a bunch tries to comply with the directions written on a bit of paper for the primary time.

Students can also pitch their very own concepts on how they’d current their group’s checklist. All the actions and voices (as relevant) needs to be massive and exaggerated.

5. Give college students time in school to plan and rehearse their performances. If you need this train to be a bigger undertaking, chances are you’ll assign a part of the duty as homework and have college students observe at residence and current the subsequent day.

6. Students will current their scenes for the remainder of the category.

7. After every group presents, college students will full and submit a person reflection.

Click right here for a free reflection.