Placemat

A cooperative structure for groups of four around one sheet of paper with four personal fields and one centre field. For each question everyone first writes their own answer in their own field in silence, then everyone reads out in turn what they wrote, and finally the group phrases one answer for the centre — one sentence all four stand behind. Optionally the class closes every round with a short comparison of the centre sentences.

With the default times one question costs about seven minutes: 3 minutes writing, 2 minutes sharing and 2 minutes for the consensus, plus the optional class-wide closing round of 3 minutes. Forming the fours and handing out the sheets is its own first step of three minutes, run once — set it to 0 if the groups already sit around their sheet. Whoever prepares the activity sets the time per step; every question you enter becomes its own round, so two or three questions fill ten to thirty minutes.

The structure scales with the class: every four works on its own sheet, so eight groups work as well as two. If the class does not divide by four, make one or two groups of three or five and draw the fields beforehand — below three there is nothing to negotiate, above five the reading round drags.

Both start in silence and end together, but they move in opposite directions. The snowball gathers: from individual via pairs and fours to one plenary idea map of the whole class. The placemat decides: four answers on one sheet become one, per group. If you want a broad harvest, take the snowball; if you want every group to end with a carried answer, take the placemat.

Think-pair-share is think, share in a pair, done — nothing has to be chosen. The placemat adds the two elements that make the difference: the paper, which turns everyone's answer into a visible and lasting trace, and the centre field, which forces the group to make one answer out of four. If you only want to get everyone thinking for a minute, Think, Write & Share is quicker.

Per group one large sheet (A3 or flip-chart) and markers. The free basic kit holds a ready-made A3 placemat sheet — print it, laminate it, and with a whiteboard marker it serves every lesson again. Making your own is just as easy: fold or draw the sheet into four outer fields with a rectangle in the middle — drawing two diagonals and keeping the centre free works too. In LudensFlow you additionally project the instruction for each step to the class, with a timer per phase and the sheet as a moving example on screen, so nobody has to ask what to do.

One open question with several defensible answers, concrete enough to write an own answer on in three minutes. "What do you think of this chapter?" yields air; "what is the most important turning point in this story, and why?" yields four positions the group has to work with. Out of ideas? Ask Microsoft Copilot: "Write 3 open questions about [topic] for a placemat with students aged [age]. Each question must have several good answers, so a group of four can make one shared answer out of them. One question per line, no numbering." Every line you take over becomes its own round.

You guard the zones and the turns, not the content. Decide beforehand how the fours are formed — voluntarily, at random, or deliberately mixed on a criterion you name neutrally. During the writing you walk around without saying anything; silence holds better when you do not have to correct it. During the sharing you repeat one rule: responding only after the round. During the consensus you stay away from the tables that get stuck — that conversation is the assignment — and in the closing round you have them read out, not summarise.

Yes: give every group a shared document or online whiteboard with four corners and a centre field, and set the writing step explicitly as a silent writing task — microphones off. The reading round and the consensus happen per group in a breakout room; afterwards you collect the centre sentences on one shared board. Allow a little extra time for the transitions online.

The placemat (also known as placemat consensus) belongs to the cooperative learning structures that entered classrooms through the work of, among others, Spencer Kagan and David and Roger Johnson. Its core — write separately first, talk together after — rests on the same research that underpins think-pair-share and the nominal group technique.