Gallery Walk

A gallery walk is an ice breaker activity for a group's first meeting. It serves to introduce participants to each other and acknowledge that they already know a lot about the topic at hand.

As participants in a course or workshop arrive at the first meeting, they can be grouped in twos or threes, given marker pens, asked to introduce themselves to each other, and directed to one of a number of flip chart stations. Each flip chart has a question. Participants review the answers already contributed by any previous groups, add their own, then move to the right around the stations.
When the first groups returns to where they began, volunteer from those groups are asked to summarize the main themes and contrasts for one of the flip charts. They present these summaries to the whole group, with the aid of a single powerpoint slide, overhead transparency, or photocopied sheet, or by drawing on the flip chart in question. If a sheet listing the questions is distributed to participants, they can take notes.

This activity exemplifies the principles that people already know a lot, including knowing what they need to learn, and, if this knowledge is elicited and affirmed, they become better at learning from others. Other reasons for the activity are given after the following two examples:

Example 1: Gallery Walk Questions for Class 1 of a course on Evaluation of Educational Change

• 1. What changes (big and small) are being pursued in teaching, schools, and educational policy?
• 2. What kinds of experience prepare teachers, administrators, and policy makers to pursue change in constructive ways?
• 3. What things would tell us that positive educational changes had happened?
• 4. What do you hope will come from this semester's experience?

Example 2: Gallery Walk Questions used at the start of a year-long professional development course for math and science educators to promote inquiry and problem-solving in a watershed context.

• 1. What factors (big and small) are involved in maintaining healthy watersheds?
• 2. What watershed issues might translate well into math. and science teaching?
• 3. What pressures & challenges do you see facing teachers wanting to improve math. and science teaching?
• 4. What has helped you in the past make improvements successfully (+), and what has hindered you (-)?
• 5. What things would tell you that positive educational changes had happened?
• 6. What kinds of things do you hope will come from this course/ professional development experience?

At a STEMTEC workshop in 1999, the following reasons were given for using the gallery walk at the start of a course. Analogous reasons apply to the start of any group's work together.

• 1. Breaks the ice and introduces students who might otherwise never interact.
• 2. Begins the community-building process so central to cooperative learning and emphasizes the collaborative, constructed nature of knowledge.
• 3. Suggests to students their centrality in the course, and that their voices, ideas, and experiences are significant and valued.
• 4. Allows for both consensus and debate—two skills essential to knowledge-building—and facilitates discussion when the class reconvenes as a larger group.
• 5. Enables physical movement around the room, an important metaphor for the activity at the course's core.
• 6. Depending on the gallery walk questions, provides one way for the instructor to gauge prior knowledge and skills, and identify potentially significant gaps in these.
• 7. Depending on the gallery walk questions, provides a way to immediately introduce students to a central concept, issue or debate in the field.
• 8. Through reporting back, provides some measure of closure by which students can assess their own understandings.