Envoy

Each group solves it, then sends one person to another table to explain their answer and listen to a different one. The envoy comes home with something the group has to reckon with.

Explaining it elsewhere is the test. You only find out whether a group understands when one of them has to say it to strangers.

No regrouping. One child moves per group. Thirty seconds, not five minutes.

Eleven minutes. Solve, travel, report back — and the reporting back is the part that changes minds.

A timer for each stage, with what the children do in each · free to try · no sign-up

The sheet it prints — optional

The printable Envoy travel sheet — an A4 page for your group’s answer, the one you visited, the difference, and what you changed.

What is the envoy activity?

Envoy is a cooperative learning structure in which each group works out an answer, then sends one member — the envoy — to another group to explain it and to hear theirs. The envoy returns and reports, and the home group decides whether to change anything.

It exists because a group can produce a correct answer that only one child understands. Sending somebody out to explain it, without the group to lean on, is the cheapest test of whether the understanding was shared or borrowed.

How do you run an envoy activity, step by step?

Work it out (about five minutes). The group solves the problem. Say now that anybody may be the envoy, so nobody can opt out of understanding it.
Envoy travels (about three minutes). One person moves — you choose, after they have finished. They explain their group's answer and listen to the host group's.
Report back (about three minutes). The envoy comes home and reports what they heard. The group decides whether to revise.

Eleven minutes. Choosing the envoy after the work is the whole trick — announce it beforehand and the group elects its most confident speaker and everybody else relaxes.

How is envoy different from a jigsaw?

In a jigsaw every child moves and nobody holds more than a quarter of the material, so the interdependence is total and the regrouping is a whole-class operation. In envoy only one child per group moves and the group keeps its own complete answer — so it is much lighter on classroom management and much lighter on interdependence.

Use envoy when groups have all done the same task and you want cross-pollination. Use expert circles when you have deliberately given them different material.

From the classroom

Choosing the envoy after the work, at random, is the single change that made this work. When I announced envoys at the start, groups appointed their best talker, and that child did the thinking too. Now I say “anybody could be going”, and when the timer stops I name them — and suddenly every group spends its last minute making sure the quiet one could explain it, which is exactly the behaviour I wanted all along. The second thing: give the envoy something to carry. A sheet, their working, anything. A child walking to another table with empty hands feels ridiculous and mumbles; a child holding their group's answer has a reason to be there. And send them to a group that reached a different answer if you can — two identical answers meeting produces a very short conversation.

What usually goes wrong with envoy?

The envoy is announced too early, so one child does the work and the rest coast.
Envoys visit a group with the same answer and there is nothing to report. Steer them if you can see the answers.
The report-back is skipped for time, which removes the only reason the travelling happened.
The host group goes silent when a visitor arrives. Tell hosts beforehand that their job is to explain, not to be inspected.

Which year groups is envoy for?

Year group	US grade	What to change	How long
Years 2–3	Grades 1–2	Send two envoys together. One explains, one listens.	9 min
Years 4–5	Grades 3–4	One envoy, chosen at random after the work. Use the travel sheet.	11 min
Year 6 and up	Grades 5–8	Two rounds of travel, different tables, before reporting back.	15 min

Envoy compared with the other cross-group structures

Expert Circles gives each group different material and regroups everybody — more powerful, far more disruptive.
Rotating Stations moves whole groups between tasks rather than moving one person between answers.
Silent Card Sort's walk-around stage does something similar for free: see how another table did it, then account for the difference.

Free to try · no sign-up · the sheet is optional

Expert Circles →The heavier version — everybody regroups, and nobody has more than a quarter of the material. All 24 cooperative structures →Think Pair Share, Round Robin, Snowball and the rest — each with a timer and a step-by-step.

Written by a practising primary school teacher, and part of the free-to-try Teaching Routines set on Sage Teachers. Last checked August 2026. Everything here is free to try.