Think-Pair-Share

I was part of a group of colleagues who attended a workshop on Friday on ways to strengthen student engagement. Think-Pair-Share was one of the several cooperative learning techniques that presenter Marco Cicerone used on us in order to clearly demonstrate their effectiveness.

Here's a general procedure to utilize Think-Pair-Share, which can be used for quickly discussing a point, a question, or a topic, eliciting a reaction, previewing, or reviewing.

1. Pair students up with A's and B's (or with any other way of pairing).
2. Each student first thinks for a minute about a question posed by the teacher. Individual students can jot down their thoughts during this thinking minute.
3. Partner A shares his or her thoughts with Partner B. Then, they switch roles. The listening partner should just listen without interrupting the talking partner. This sharing part takes a minute.
4. Partner B reports to the whole class only the thoughts of one of them for 30 seconds.

The benefits of the Think-Pair-Share strategy include:

• breaking the model of one student talking at a time or the model of the teacher talking with only a few students during a class discussion; maximizing involvement of all students
• no more domination of whole-class discussions by the same handful talkative students; including the reticent students in the learning process
• training students to be active listeners
• training students to be both independent and interdependent--the former because each student is expected to think about/jot down their own responses, the latter because partners learn from each other when they share their thoughts and they also depend on each other to decide whose thoughts to share with the whole class
• providing support to weaker students because each pair is required to share only one thought with the whole class
• providing opportunities and models for weaker students to work harder since they cannot expect to be relying on others all the time as they won't have the same partner each time
• increasing the quality of responses due to the fact that students are given time to think/or write about their thoughts, share them with a partner, and report to the whole class
• enabling students to have better recall due to the number of "repeats"
• building a positive sense of the class community and a very energetic, dynamic, and effective learning environment

Even though I had heard about and even used Think-Pair-Share to some degree before, what I was shown on Friday made the strategy crystal clear to me. I can't wait to try it anew in my class on Monday.