Paired discussions - Tips for Teachers Top 5s

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The five tips are:

Give students enough time to think individually first
Give a conversation prompt
Ensure students have something to discuss
Better too short than too long
Ask questions to find the best paired discussions to share

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Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five, all about student pair discussion. Now just as a reminder, this is available both as an audio podcast and also is a video. And if you look below, either in the podcast show notes or the video description on YouTube or on tips for teachers, you’ll find links so you can access this in both mediums and share it with your colleagues. Okay, so student paired discussions. Now, they’re a hallmark of pretty much every lesson that I’m lucky enough to watch. But over the course of the last three years or so, I’ve been on a bit of a mission to try and find tips from expert practitioners to make student pair discussions as effective and productive as possible. Now, in my tips, a teacher’s book available in all good and evil bookstores, I talk about 15 ideas to improve such pair discussions that I call partner talk. But in this video and podcast, I’m going to share five of my favourite of those ideas with you.

So here’s the first one. Now, what I often see and I’ve done this myself is teachers ask students a question or put a question on the board or the verbalise a question. And then they’ll say to students, discuss it with your partner. Now, there’s two problems with that. First is what happens in the subsequent discussion is the most confident, or the highest achieving students or the student is grasped it the quickest will dominate that conversation because they got their answer straightaway, there’ll be like, I think it’s this, this, this and this, and the other students simply won’t have a chance to think about their thoughts to contemplate what they think. And they end up being very passive as part of the discussion. Or the other thing that happens whenever you kind of launch straight into a pair discussion is it becomes a very, it doesn’t become a conversation, it becomes very much one student speaks, whilst the other student instead of actively listening is trying to think what they think the answer to that question is. Whereas instead, if you give students some time to think individually first, before that pair discussion, both students can arrive at that pair discussion and ready to share their thoughts, and also just as important, ready to listen to their thoughts as their partner. Now how long to give students and that’s obviously going to be dependent on the class, the complexity of the question, it may be a few seconds, it may be 30 seconds, it’s also a good idea to give students an opportunity to jot down their thoughts on a mini whiteboard or on a piece of paper to kind of unburden their working memory. So again, they can use that as a prompt to help them make the most out of the subsequent pad discussion. So tip number one, give students enough time to think individually.

First, at Tip number two, a conversation prompt. Again, this is another mistake I’ve made, I’ve said to my students, okay, talk to you, the person next to you talk to your partner. And I’m almost assuming there that being able to have a positive productive pair discussion is a really easy skill, but it’s not necessarily. Whereas if we can support students by saying, okay, when you discuss with your partner, I want you to say I think the answer is because something as simple as that just gives a bit of a structure to that pair discussion, make sure that students share both their what they think the answer is, and their reason for it. And it just may help that discussion flow a bit quicker. So a conversation prompting, you’ll know yourself for different discussions, what different prompts may be needed.

Tip number three, this is a big one, you know, and often I’ve given my students something to discuss. And you know, five seconds later, I look at a pair. And I said, Why don’t you Why don’t you talk to each other? So we have nothing left to talk about. And when you probe a bit deeper, often it’s because they both agree on the same answer. And that’s it. Okay. Well, III thinks that I think the same done and dusted. You don’t really want that. So what I say to students, is this. Usually conversation prompt, I think the answer is because the other person I think the answer is because now if your two answers are different, I want you to argue with each other who do you think’s right? Can you convince the other of your way of thinking, but if your two answers are the same? What’s the best explanation you can come up with between you to explain this that would help somebody who doesn’t know what the answer is? So just making sure that in both scenarios, students know what they’ve got to do means that those discussions will benefit as many different students as possible.

Tip number four. Now, this is a big one, it’s quite hard to get this right. You know, what I’ve done in the past is hello to my mistakes here, right? Is I’ve stopped the pair discussion at the point where it’s fizzling out. And I say to students, okay, so I’m listening, I’m listening for that noise level, dip in dip in dip and dip in and they’ll say, Okay, now let’s do either, you know, individual work, or what do you think what do you think whatever comes after the pair discussion? The problem with that is the energy’s gone, and you having to try to pick the students back up again. Whereas if you caught the pair discussion off at the point where the noise level, that kind of enthusiasm, the engagement when you’re Since then it’s almost at its peak, then whatever happens next, the students are going to take that energy into it, whether it’s individual work, whether it’s discussions, whatever it may be, Doug Lemov, talks about stopping the peer discussion on the crest of the wave, as opposed to letting it crash and burn and then the energy goes. So again, you’ll know yourself, whether you use the barometer of noise, or whether you can just sense in your kids, but cut those discussions off at their peak or as close to the peak as possible. And it will make whatever comes next much more impactful.

And finally, I love this one. So pair discussions are after a rehearsal or rehearsal, either for individual work or maybe a rehearsal for you then to choose a few pairs to share their thoughts. But how do you choose which pairs to to ask who you’re going to pick? Well, I’ve got three favourite questions I like to ask. Third, that is going to help me decide which pairs I’m going to ask to share their thinking. So the first is this, I’ll say, Okay, after you pay discussion, okay, quite everybody. Now put your hand up, if you disagree with the answer of your partner. And again, you can be sure, then you’re going to get two conflicting opinions on something. And that’s going to be great for you then to share that with the rest of the class, who agrees with him who agrees with her, and so on and so forth. I also like this one, this is a good one, put your hand up, if you change your mind during your discussion. Again, that’s going to give you such a good insight that you’re going to want to share with the rest of the class, because a student used to think this, and now they change their mind or why they change their mind what convinced them and the thing that convinced them might just be the thing that convinces other students in the class, or this is a good one as well put your hand up if your partner said something you found useful. This is particularly good if you’ve got students who perhaps lack a bit of confidence, who aren’t going to kind of voice it themselves. If their partner says, You know what I was talking to Emily, she said this, and it really made sense to me, that’s gonna be great for me. And it’s also going to be great for the rest of the class to benefit for that. So being a bit tactical, asking those questions to filter out, which groups we’re going to choose to hear from, I think can work quite well.

So there are five tips for improving student pair discussions. And the thing I always ask teachers to reflect on at this point is which of these you already do and you don’t need to worry about? And which of these do you perhaps not do perhaps as much as you’d like to or maybe you’ve never done but you feel are important that you could build into your practice.

If you found that useful, as I said, there’s a load other tips about pair discussions and also on pretty much every other aspect of teaching in my tips for teachers book, you can get that wherever you buy your books. And also if you head to the website tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll find the tips of teachers podcast, you’ll find loads of videos of tips that you can share in departmental meetings. You’ll also find a newsletter that you can subscribe to so you get a tip to train your classroom every Monday morning, and you’ll also find access to all my CPD both online and in person. Hope you found that useful.