Welcome to the Buddy Study page! I hope you find this method of study interesting.
Buddy study is actually a very old technique, however, it was only used in a very niche environment: religious text study in Orthodox Jewish yeshivas. Today, we are adapting it to our own purposes of analysis and synthesis.
Standard 60 Minute Protocol
The basic premise is this:
3 minute introduction (welcoming the students and/or introducing the text)
42 minute pair study period
10 minute discussion where the students all reconvene and combine their observations into possibly even more profound
5 minute intersession break
Repeat this every 60 minutes for an extended period of time. You can change texts after 60 minutes if you wish or continue studying the text.
If there are too many students or people do not have the patience to study 42 minutes with the same study partner, have people rotate between partners every 14 or 21 minutes. You can also have 4 pairs with 10 minutes for each, in which case the extra 2 minutes are added to the 10 minute discussion at the end.
Give each of 2N participants a distinct number from 1 to 2N (with the person hosting the main breakout room or session participating in the case of an odd number, changing 2N-1 to 2N). We’ll call the people from 1-N the North/South team and N+1 to 2N the East/West team.
Create N-1 breakout rooms. For N = 10, 20 or 21 students will have 10 breakout rooms plus the host room.
Put the corresponding North/South and East/West people together in breakout rooms modulo N for the first session. For N = 10, 1 and 11 get breakout room 1, 2 and 12 get breakout room 2, and so forth.
When it comes time to rotate partners, the North/South students stay put in their breakout room and the East partners move one breakout room up (11 goes to 2, 19 goes to 10, 20 goes to 1, and so forth). If there is an odd number of students the main room would count as a breakout room (where the host can’t leave and would count as the last North/South in that case).
90 Minute Protocol
3 minute introduction
21 minute truncated pair study
3 minute break
21 minute pair study
3 minute break
21 minute pair study
10 minute integration session
8 minute break
Case Study: Enneagram Session for Nerdstock II
For an Enneagram session, the people introduce themselves to each other and then try to type each other. That way not only do you meet a new person but you can find more about him or her as well. Your partner may figure things out about you which you didn’t notice in yourself because you’re blind to them.
During the integration session, people go into breakout rooms based on Enneagram type number (guess which type goes into breakout room 1?). If there aren’t enough people to keep all the breakout rooms full, go into three rooms based on instinctual variant (social, self-preservation, and intimate).