500+ Icebreaker Questions

Believe it or not we're closer to the start of the new school year than we are to the end of the last one. Whether we're going back into our physical classrooms or staying in an online environment, we're going to need to get to know our new students and they need to get to know each other. One way to do this is through asking fun icebreaker questions. If you've run through all of your common icebreaker questions and want some new ones to try, take a look at Icebreakers.io.

Icebreakers.io offers lists of icebreaker questions. The questions are arranged in categories for small groups, for introverts, for adults, for work, and for fun. Coming soon they'll have lists specifically for school settings. All of the questions can be viewed individually and copied. You can also download the lists of questions in convenient PDFs.

Applications for Education
I looked through the lists on Icebreakers.io and found plenty that I would feel comfortable posing to students in my classroom, in a Zoom meeting, or in Google Classroom to start a discussion. I'm looking forward to seeing the school questions list that Icebreakers.io is building.

Student Responses to Witnessing Violence

I try not to post CNN Student News items on consecutive days, but today's episode has a segment that I think could really spark some excellent dialogue with students. In fact, I'm going to use it this morning. The third segment of the show is about student responses to witnessing acts of violence. The segment features students explaining why they think people might not report to authorities violence they witness. Here is one student's response, "I think the reason nobody called it in is the same reason that a whole class sees someone cheating on the test and no one tells: because you don't want to risk being excluded from that group or being included in the bad situation."
The video is embedded below.

Student Conversation Starter

Today's episode of CNN Student News has a short segment in which there is a discussion about the differences in the ways in which male and female students learn. The segment talks about the idea of all male or all female middle schools.

This segment could be a good prompt for getting students to reflect and discuss the ways in which they learn.