Summer eLC Meeting - August 27th and 28th, 2025
Icebreaker COIL “Sort, reflect, and dialogue”
Instructions:
SORT
1. Find a partner who is not from your college. One is partner A, one is partner B.
2. Give out envelopes with items in them.
3. Open envelope and partner A sorts them into 2 or more groups. Sort whatever way partner A wants to do.
4. Partner B must watch in silence and NOT ask questions.
5. Then partner B is going to guess why partner A sorted it that way (what are the sorting categories that were used).
6. Switch. Partner B sorts while partner A watches in silence. Partner A guesses.
7. Then A and B go again and sort it in a different way.
REFLECT
1. How did you feel when you went first? How did you feel while sorting?
2. How did you feel while you were silent while watching?
What categories did you come up with? How did people sort?
DIALOGUE
· The facilitator just brought various items--no rationale. No right outcome, no solution. There isn’t a solution.
Some did it collaboratively and came up with more solutions.
· What did we learn from this?
o Intercultural awareness: there’s not one way to look at the world. An ethnocentric view is squashed with this activity. A core COIL competency is intercultural awareness or competence.
o Past experiences shape your thoughts.
o Language affects the way that you think (reference hypothesis Sapir-Wharf that language affects the way that you think).
· How could you do this as an ice-breaker in an ONLINE class?
o Start with a Google doc with images of items; then have someone remote in via Google hangout. Cut and paste.
o Can use Google comment on Google doc.
o Or, could assign this for a student to do on their own time with another partner and then discuss it online.
o Could embed a video.
o If do it F2F, allocate 30 minutes.
o Do it in a LMS: threaded discussion. Give instructions. Each student is asked to create a new category/way to sort and post a picture of it. You then go to another students’ post, view it, then guess how they sorted it. When you get it right, then post “this one has been solved.”
o Or, have students post how they categorized in sort 1 and 2. Do it as an adaptive release, so they get the questions about reflecting, then the student writes a reflection piece and posts on discussion board.
o Could use padlet.com https://twitter.com/anngh/status/578574120264286208 for this too.
o More instructions on how to do it online: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tc_vP3Rwi0O7Z35PvnQYHkEuA7DPbK1kEwzYkgidEk8/edit
Thanks to: Amy McHugh and Doug Hemphill @ SUNY COIL pre-conference session who adapted this activity from Janet Bennett who runs the summer Intercultural Communication Institute in Portland, OR.