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Four Corners is an out-of-your-seat strategy in which participants choose between four different answers and move to the designated “corner” to register their Yes/I agree vote. This strategy asks participants to physically make a choice and is especially useful for concrete thinkers who benefit from specific choices.
Before the activity, create a series of statements on a topic, each of which has four pre-determined choices as answers. For example: I am most focused in the…. early morning, midday, afternoon, evening. Begin by designating each of the four corners of the room to represent a particular answer. Then, call out the prompt, to which participants respond to by moving to one of the four corners of the room. Once participants have divided themselves into four corners, invite the groups to dialogue about why they made their choice. Talk with your group about why you picked this time of day as your most focused time. Groups can synthesize their responses to share with the entire group. This process can be repeated with a new statement and set of response categories. Ideally the group will shift and re-arrange into a variety of different subgroups so that participants have a chance to dialogue with many different people throughout the activity.
- What did you learn about yourself? About someone else?
- What did we learn about the group as whole? How do our discoveries impact what we want to do?
- What does this activity have to do with our larger inquiry?
- Introduce yourself to people you don’t know before beginning discussion.
- Talk with people in your corner about why they are standing where they are. Come up with a sentence to share with the group that synthesizes your dialogue.
- What did you learn about some of the people you talked with in your group?
- Designate the four corners of the room as “Strongly Agree,” “Agree,” “Disagree,” and “Strongly Disagree.”
- READING: Designate each corner as a character/setting/event from a book. Students pick their favorite corner and then answer a question about the person, place, event.
- MATH and SCIENCE: Designate each corner as a shape, a number, a species, or an element from the periodic table and groups must name a favorite property or a fact using mathematic or scientific language.
- SOCIAL STUDIES: Designate each corner as a geographic area, a famous leader from history, or a time period and have students discuss what they know, generate facts or construct a question for the rest of the group to answer about their corner topic.
- Expand or contract the number of the choices, this could be Three Corners or Five Corners.
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