Numbered Heads Together

One of Harvey Daniels’ seven structures of Best Practice teaching is “small group activities." Here’s a very easy, no-prep-needed group activity that takes no more time to do than the whole class discussion it replaces.
Numbered Heads Together (Spencer Kagan, 1994) is an easy way to conduct a class question-and-answer session where all of the students are engaged, instead of just those few who always raise their hands to answer. This can be effectively used to work through problems, review material, discuss homework—and it’s so easy to organize! No extra prep time needed!

Here are the steps:
1. Put students in teams of equal sizes, if possible. Then, ask students in each group to number/count off.
2. The teacher poses a question/problem. The question should be formulated as a directive. Kagan gives this example: “Instead of saying ‘What is the meter in the poem?’ the teacher says, ‘Make sure everyone on the team can describe the meter in the poem.'” Another example might be “Make sure you can all make several predictions about the future behavior of the American Economy based on the paper shortage and the law of supply and demand.” It’s important to state that “everyone on the team . . .” or “all or you . . . .”
3. Heads together. Here students talk as a group—they literally “put their heads together” to discuss the answer. It is important that everyone in the group be able to articulate a response. The key is that even though not all members of the team may know the answer at first, the group has to discuss, come to a consensus, and make sure all members understand and can verbalize an answer. You may need to set a specific time limit to insure that students stay on task.
4. The teacher calls out a number. The teacher calls out a number and the group members with that number raise their hands to respond. The teacher then calls on one of the students who has a raised hand. If the answer requires several parts, the teacher can ask for other students who raised hands to add to the response.
The beauty of this activity is that in the groups each team member has to figure out the answer, in case his/her number is called. Everyone is thinking and is engaged.