Pair Share Teaching Strategy:How To Ensure All Students Participate In Classroom Learning.

A traditional approach of asking questions and waiting for students to raise their hand to answer has the in-built disadvantage that some students may never answer and the teacher can only choose one student at a time to answer.

Two consequences arise from this: firstly, it is possible for some students to hide, sometimes for the entire lesson, and, secondly, students who raise their hands but are not asked to give an answer may become disillusioned and view the whole question and answer process as arbitrary at best and unfair at worst.

Fortunately a number of alternative strategies are available to teachers, which will ensure that every student takes responsibility for contributing to the knowledge sharing process and, at the same time, make the process be seen as more democratic. One such strategy is Think, Pair, Share.

Here's how the pair share teacher strategy works:

Stage 1 [Think]

Give all students a question or task to consider completely on their own, within a time limit of perhaps 1 or 2 minutes [sometimes less] depending on the complexity of the question or task. It is really important here that students must consider their answer independently. Students may be asked to write down their answer or simply to work out an answer in their heads.

Stage 2 [Pair]

Each student then pairs up with another student, and each student shows the other their answer. Tell students they have to agree on a correct answer, and if both students in the pair have different answers encourage them to justify their answers to the partner student.

Stage 3 [Share]

Choose individual students at random to give the agreed answer for their pair. If a pair cannot agree on the same answer, both answers should be written up. Once a few answers have been offered by students the teacher can intervene and confirm which answer is correct. This is the most powerful part of the process because it gives all students access to all the thinking power of all the other students in the class, and shares the learning out among every student. It is a very practical example of synergy at work.

The next step is rinse and repeat the pair share teaching strategy with further questions or tasks.

Follow up: the teacher may also want to consider adding these strategies to the process:

* if any students were not able to agree with their partners on a correct answer, ask the students whose answers were wrong why they believed their particular answer was correct

* ask students who did find the correct answer how they knew their answer was correct.

* a simple pack of numbered cards can be used to choose which students will share their answers with the whole class in the final phase [each student is given a number at the start of the lesson]

When using this pair share teaching strategy it must be clear to all students that this technique values everyone’s individual effort to understand, and wrong answers are acceptable if they help move students one step nearer to the right answer.

The randomness of the final stage should ensure that all students see how important it is to find answers for themselves – they can not rely on someone else being chosen, as might be the case with a hands up system.

This is an outline technique which can, of course , be adapted to different situations within any classroom.


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