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Think-Pair-Share

Materials required
Implementation procedure
Strategy in practice

None

  1. Provide a question or statement prompt to the students.

  2. Allocate time for students to think individually on the prompt.

  3. Instruct the students to pair up (this could mean the person sitting next to them or you can design interactions to facilitate pairing in other contexts) and discuss their individual ideas. Strive to have groups of two whenever possible. If there is an uneven number of students, a group of three works well, too.

  4. Encourage (but don’t force) the pairs to share their responses in class.

Janet teaches ethics and mindfulness to fifth grade students. Today’s class is about building trust. She shows the discussion prompt on the board:

 

How do you build trust?

 

This main prompt is followed by a few guiding questions: Think about your own personal experiences. Have you ever broken someone’s trust or has someone broken your sense of trust? How did that make you feel?

She gives the students five minutes to think and reflect upon the questions individually. She then tells the students to pair up with the person sitting next to them and discuss. After five minutes, she encourages the students to share what they discussed. Students who feel like sharing their discussion points raise their hands, and Janet acknowledges their responses positively and facilitates a further discussion.

References:

Simon, C. A. Using the think-pair-share technique. Retrieved October 28, 2016, from http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/using-think-pair-share-30626.html

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