Alphabet Lists—Getting to Know Your Classmates
Purpose: The aim of this exercise is to get students to introduce themselves and to initiate collaborative working relationships immediately. It emphasizes writing as a collaborative process that requires input and feedback from others. This exercise works well as an icebreaker in the first week or prior to the first peer workshop.
Description: Students exchange ideas with each other to complete an informal writing assignment.
Suggested Time: 20 minutes
Procedure: Ask every student to take out a loose piece of paper and write the letters of the alphabet vertically down the left side of the paper. Next, choose a topic; sometimes I ask students to suggest potential topics or I often simply choose “writing” as a way to start a discussion about it. When you’ve got a topic, give students only one or two minutes to write words they associate with the topic that start with every letter of the alphabet (i.e. for “writing”, A for “argument” etc). When the time limit is up, students will have incomplete alphabets. Next, ask your students to get up and introduce themselves to another student and trade with that person one missing word before moving on to someone else. After some time, students will eventually have completed their alphabets and met almost everyone in the class. Ask for a few volunteers to read their alphabet lists. At this point, I often talk about how writing is a collaborative endeavor and segue into an explanation of the peer workshop.