3 Retrieval Games to Try in Your High School Classroom

“Are we doing something fun today, sir?” This perennially popular question from students always gets the same response from me. “But Charlie, of course, since English is always fun.”

A few years ago, I decided to give a different answer. “Absolutely, Charlie. Today we’re going to play a game.” I wanted to create a set of activities that would be genuinely fun to play but still yield productive and meaningful results. They needed to be frictionless: easy to deploy when needed but requiring no prior preparation. They had to be drag-and-drop; self-contained and easy to implement. At the time, retrieval practice was a pervasive idea (and still is). Whatever I did needed to encourage retrieval: Students would have to engage with previously taught content.

What first started as an attempt to introduce a few games into my teaching is still, years later, a core part of my practice. I think of them as retrieval games, distinct from other more traditional types of retrieval we might do, such as brain dumps or quick quizzes. They’re high-energy activities; everyone in the room has a shared awareness that the games are meant to be fun and not intended to be taken seriously.

These games can start or end the lesson, and they sometimes function as a transition within the lesson between topics. I don’t need to use them any longer, but I choose to use the following three games simply because they work really well. They can be used in any class and require very little (if any) preparation. These examples are drawn from the English classroom, but they could be adapted to suit most subjects.

1. DoodleBuzz

Hand out a stack of index cards, and ask your students to draw a visual representation of a quotation from one of the texts you’ve studied on one side. It doesn’t need to be great art, but it should, in some way, capture or express their chosen quotation. For instance, the line “It is the star to every wandering bark” from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” might become a tiny boat on a series of wavy blue lines. (A “bark” is a small, straying boat.) Make sure that students don’t write any words on the card and that they don’t tell each other which quotation they’re using.

Once students finish their doodles, collect the cards and shuffle the deck. Next, place the cards, one by one, under a visualizer camera so that students can see the doodle on the screen. If you don’t have a visualizer, get students to draw their doodle bigger, maybe on a mini-whiteboard or piece of printer paper, so that you can hold them up.

When you place the card under the camera, students need to “buzz in” and guess the correct quotation. This is where things get interesting: Ask students to make a noise to buzz in with their answer. It could be anything from banging the table to some kind of outlandish shout. The more inventive (and respectful), the better.

The first student to get it right wins the card. The first to win three cards wins the game and, until next time at least, becomes DoodleBuzz champion.

2. Quotation Volleyball

Ask students to take a blank piece of paper and write down as many quotations from a given text as they can. Once finished, have them crumple up the paper or move it out of sight so that they can’t see it.

Next, split the class in half. The two halves turn their chairs so that they are directly facing each other. Ask them to imagine a ball being thrown into the air; they “hit” it by saying a quotation. The other side hits it back with another quotation. Anyone can join in: Just shout out a quotation.

If a quotation is duplicated, because students aren’t paying attention, the ball hits the floor. If one side takes too long, the ball hits the floor. If someone gets a quotation wrong, the ball hits the floor. Every time the ball hits the floor, the other team gets a point. The teacher (or another student) is the umpire and makes the final call. The first side to get five points wins.

To make things more interesting, introduce a new text during the game. This means students need to think on their feet and not just rely on the quotation they initially jotted down. Or, give each side a different text: Their quotation can be drawn only from the specified text.

3. The Game of Crossing Out

This game starts like Quotation Volleyball: Students write down as many quotes as they can remember on a blank piece of paper. Explain that the more they write, the better chance they have of winning. The premise of the game is this: Students will need to do certain tasks that will result in some words being crossed out. Whoever has the most words left at the end, wins.

Start a chain: Ask one student to say a quotation that they wrote down. If anyone else has it written down, they have to cross it out. This introduces strategy into the game: The first student needs to calculate which quotation is likely to be most popular. Next, the first student nominates another student, who must say a quotation that in some way links to the first. If anyone has this new quotation, they cross it out. Here’s the trick. Students can challenge the link: If it doesn’t seem to fit, whoever picked it needs to explain the link. If they can’t explain it well enough (the class decides in a general discussion), then that student has to cross out five other quotations.

At the end of the game, whoever has the most quotations left wins.

The Rationale Behind the Revelry

It’s important to note that in all of these games, the teacher is the arbiter. They should know if the quotations are accurate or not and can make a judgment as to how precise students need to be to score the point. I always tell my students, in a humorous way, that “the teacher is the umpire and their word is final.” Disputes always go to the teacher, who makes the final call. I also advise that play should continue unless the teacher stops it. This way, students don’t constantly question each other during play.

The core pedagogic rationale behind these games is simple: They motivate students to think about previously taught content. Because we use games, they think even harder. It’s the difference between asking students to write down everything they can remember and asking them to write down everything they can remember because it might help them to win a game. One is always going to lead to more thinking and more writing than the other. Besides, the games are really, really fun. And that is no bad thing. Let the games begin.