We broke the students up into two groups and each teacher worked with a group, doing the same, or parallel, activity. We asked all students to stand up. Then we told them that we needed to brainstorm some examples of rich replacement words for the word “good,” (which we were seeing too much of in the writing.) We told students that as soon as they shared an example they could sit down.
Students quickly volunteered to share so that they could sit down. One student told me she was motivated to share quickly before someone else took her idea. We had much better participation than if we had simply asked for volunteers.
In the future, I might adapt this by having students form mixed-readiness pairs and do the work as a partnership. I love that I can use this for anytime that I want a multitude of contributions and some out-of-seat time.