This strategy involves students putting statements or pictures in order of importance. This may be used to look deeper into an issue, such as agreeing the most basic needs of all children or planning a course of action. (The needs can be taken from a prior brainstorming session.) Students come up with a list of things to do then rank these to decide the order in which to carry them out. In the ranking process students may discard some ideas. Ranking does not need to be in a ladder from top to bottom. The students may decide that some issues are of equal importance and need to be next to each other.
In the ranking process the most important idea is ranked first and the least important ranked last. The other ideas are then ranked in between. The following diagram shows a diamond ranking as an example, but rankings do not have to be structured in this way.