OER4Schools/activities/Think Pair Share

This technique encourages cooperative learning by peer interactivity. Teachers should cue the progress from one step to the next. In the primary classroom, hand signals for each step can be developed with the students and these can be used along with verbal cues.

Here are the steps:

1. Think - Students listen to a question (this may be an open-ended question to which there are many answers) or a presentation and are given ‘think time’ to formulate their responses.
2. Pair - Following the ‘think time’, students work together with a partner, sharing ideas, discussing, clarifying and challenging.
3. Share -The pair then share their ideas with another pair, or with the whole class. Students should be prepared to share their partner’s ideas as well as their own.

Allowing students time to think, sometimes referred to as 'wait time' has been shown by researchers to improve the quality of their responses. Talking through ideas with a partner first before sharing them with a wider audience allows for those ideas to be elaborated on and refined.