Whip Around is a teaching strategy in which the teacher asks an open-ended question with multiple responses. Students will write each of their responses on a piece of paper. Then, the class comes back together for a discussion in which each student shares one response from the various responses they have written. Once a student shares that response, the rest of the class must share a difference response. Once the Whip Around is over, students should identify what common themes or ideas showed up in the responses. Whip Around activities require all students to share a variety of responses and allow 100% participation as the teacher explains in the Teacher Tool Kit video below.
I think that Whip Around is a good strategy because it allows students to think about multiple answers to a particular topic. Furthermore, it allows students to share answers their classmates may have never thought about. It also gives students a wide variety of answers in case an answer they have written has already been said. Another feature about the Whip Around that I like is that it allows students to think about what these multiple answers to a particular question have in common. In other words, it gets the students thinking about the theme of the answers. Since all the answers have to do with the same topic, they must have something in common.
Another aspect of Whip Around that I like is that it allows every student to participate. Since there are multiple answers, each student can give the teacher a different answer. In other words, Whip Around allows every student to give a response. My only concern with this strategy is that if the teacher comes to a student, and all their responses were already given, some students may not be able to give a response. I guess one way a teacher can overcome this obstacle is using questions to facilitate a response the student may not have thought about. This is where a teacher should plan ahead and have all responses constructed beforehand to know which questions to facilitate. This activity should probably be done for questions that can allow many different responses for each person in the class to come up with instead of a question that will only require two or three responses. If the teacher can come up with a variety of responses for a particular question, this strategy would probably be good for the lesson.