Thinking Together: Collaboration Skills in the Think-Pair-Share Model
Transcript
Hey everybody. Thank you for joining. My name is Shana Pond, and I am going to be helping to moderate the webinar today. So the title of today’s webinar is Thinking Together: Collaboration Skills in the Think-Pair-Share Model. Soon we’re going to be joined by Story Smith, who’s our presenter for today. But before we get started, I’d like to take just a few moments to talk about Model Teaching, our courses, and then all the services that we provide. Model Teaching is a provider of professional development courses offered to educators across the country as well as globally, including individual K-12 teachers, schools, and also school districts. All of our Model Teaching courses are founded on research-backed principles, and they cover the most important topics in education today. Our menu now has hundreds of courses available and it’s always growing, and we typically add new courses monthly.
We offer several different types of courses. Most commonly are PD courses, which are our clock hour courses, and also our credit courses. So our PD courses can generally be used for state recertification. They’re often used by schools, school districts as well, for whole campus professional learning. And then our credit courses are offered in partnership with different universities found across the country. They can also be used for state recertification in most states, as well as salary advancement for those people who might need semester credits to advance their salary. Some of the features that make our courses unique, they include reasonable course pricing. And in fact, we offer bundle packages where users can build their own bundle of courses from our entire menu. And it’s based on basically the number of clock hours or credits that you need. And then having this bundle allows us to offer our services to teachers at a much lower cost than most other providers. Model Teaching courses are also known for being very straightforward, they’re flexible, and they allow you guys to demonstrate your knowledge in a more implementation-focused way that doesn’t require long essays or other time-consuming assignments.
The webinar that you’re going to be watching today is a Model Teaching spotlight webinar. Our spotlight webinars are designed to provide you all with easy-to-implement strategies and concepts, all within a quick bite-size, just 30-minute timeframe. The webinar that you’re going to be attending today is composed of content taken from our course titled Collaborative Learning Models in the Classroom. And that course covers six different collaborative learning models that you can use in your classroom to help promote student discussion and critical thinking. You’ll also learn grouping strategies and also how to assess the performance of your students as well. So today’s webinar will focus on one of those models that we discuss in the course, and that’s the Think-Pair-Share model to help teach collaboration to your students.
Now to kick off our webinar, I’d like to introduce Story Smith. So Story Smith is a special education educator. She’s a consultant, she’s an instructional strategist, and she has over 15 years of experience across classroom, district, and higher education settings. She specializes in data-driven curriculum analysis, differentiation, and the implementation of effective and student-centered supports. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University and a master’s in special education, curriculum, and instruction, and she’s certified in Louisiana as a reading specialist and an educational diagnostician. She also serves as an educational strategist with Under the Oak Psychological Services, partnering with families and schools to design practical, sustainable solutions for diverse learners. And now I’ll turn this webinar over to Story to get started.
Hi everyone. I am so excited to be here, and I want to thank you as well for taking the time to join us. And thank you, Shana, for that introduction. Building on that just a little bit, I think it’s important to know that my experience does span across the classroom level, the district level, as well as most recently in higher education. And having been in the classroom for over 10 years myself, it is very important to me that educators feel supported. There’s no secret that we are having a very serious teacher shortage. Teacher retention is becoming more and more challenging. So that is something that I really focus on. I want teachers to feel empowered and supported to the point that they are confident and willing and wanting, more importantly, wanting to stay in the field. So with that said, what we’re going to do today is take what we know from research, and then kind of translate that to what can we actually do, what’s realistic in classrooms.
So today in particular, we’re going to talk about the Think-Pair-Share method. It is a research-based collaborative learning model, and we are going to talk about how to implement it effectively in any classroom. You will consider some elements that determine whether a collaboration activity produces strong learning. You’re also going to evaluate the kinds of questions that will promote higher order thinking and more importantly, that peer discourse. That is really the most important part of our discussion today is the students’ discussion. So with that being said, we are going to go ahead and get started. So to begin, I want you to take just a second and think about the term collaboration in your own life, not even necessarily in your classroom, but in your own life. And my guess is most of you are not imagining yourself sitting silently in a group of people or completing work alone, but more thinking about a dynamic discussion that you’re having with a colleague or a peer.
Perhaps your spouse. Collaboration is a part of our everyday life. So we’re going to really focus again on that discussion. So I want you to picture the two of you or a group of you crouched over a problem together and discussing it in detail. So that true collaboration is going to center on that interaction between your students, with you as the teacher being the facilitator. So it’s not so much the back and forth between you and your students, but it’s the back and forth between your students amongst themselves. So we are going to talk about that shared accountability, because you have to make sure that they’re dependent on each other’s thinking to solve a task, as well as the difference between collaborative work and group work. So we’re going beyond group work. Everyone has a memory of a group project where one person does the lion’s share of the work, or the focus turns more to the product rather than the process.
And we want to kind of reframe that and make sure that we clarify that collaborative learning happens when students are cooperatively working together. And it’s not so much about the product, but the process of learning and the thinking that is happening when the students are working together and discussing together. So with all that being said, I do want to take just a second and clarify some terms so that they’re clearly defined. We’re going to talk about collaboration and cooperative learning. Sometimes they will be, like I mentioned, more clearly defined, and other times they’re going to be used interchangeably. But for today, when I say collaborative learning, what I’m really talking about is student discourse. Again, that is where we get the most bang for our buck.
Students actively engaging, sharing that responsibility, and building understanding through conversation. Cooperative learning is more structured. So this is where you have to think about your intention, you have to set your purpose as that facilitator. So you’re going to facilitate the process, you’re going to create the conditions for collaboration, you’re going to design the tasks, set the groups, and then the students are going to do the heavy lifting. So that distinction matters because not all cooperative structures actually lead to meaningful collaboration. For example, we’re going to talk about think, pair, share, and that only works if it is intentionally structured to support and promote real student discourse. So throughout the session, I may use the terms interchangeably, but always with the goal of getting students to think, talk, and learn more deeply together.
So taking a moment to focus first on our number one objective, and to give me an opportunity to sort of nerd out a little bit here, we’re going to discuss the research. So the research, of course, is extensive, and most of it describes the benefits of collaboration in a structured environment. We’re just going to scratch the surface, but it is important to know that this is based on very sound research. So the first one that I want to mention is a meta-analysis that was done 26 years ago. That’s crazy. So in 2001, they compiled a whole bunch of research on cooperative learning.
The reason that we’re including this is because it’s very commonly cited. It’s older, but it does a good job still of reviewing a lot of different cooperative learning methods, and it basically shows how nearly every case that they studied as a part of this meta-analysis improved student achievement in some way. And since then, 26 years ago, since then, there have been a ton of studies that have replicated these results, just further proving the impact of this strategy, of this model. So in particular, we’re going to talk about a few more specific studies that are more recent, and that way you can kind of see what I mean. So first, we’re going to talk about a different meta-analysis called Cooperative Learning and Student Achievement, and this one’s from 2013. And it kind of confirmed the meta-analysis of Johnson and Johnson.
Basically, it found that Cooperative learning is effective in improving student achievement when you have a clear goal set and promote student accountability. The reason I like this one is because they really do emphasize that effective collaboration, it’s not just cooperative learning. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective if it’s cooperative learning. There’s some things that you have to put into place. So you really need to have those additional components of collaboration and discourse with your students. Again, this is going to sound redundant, but it’s very important. We have to have a clear goal or a path for our students to work toward.
So making sure that that objective is clear, making sure that everyone understands their roles, and that every single student, every single participant, has some level of individual accountability. So not one student is going to be doing the work. We’re not going to be dependent on a high partner or things like that. So, number three, the next research is a bit more recent. So in 2020, these researchers saw that the peer interaction was effective in promoting learning. However, it found it wasn’t necessarily any better than peer-to-adult interaction in the same classroom unless you analyze the actual structure of the collaborative task.
So something I found pretty interesting about one conclusion drawn in this review is that they found that the peer interaction is more effective when children are specifically instructed to reach a consensus. So this is not a “My partner said…” I disagree because it is a, you guys are going to have a conversation, a rich conversation with academic language, and if necessary, it will become kind of a little bit of a debate. But if you require that the students reach a consensus, the effect size in this study did increase. So now we’re going to zoom in a little bit on the research side of things. And we’re going to look in particular at the Think-Pair-Share model.
The first one is a 2013 article on how Think-Pair-Share impacts a student’s critical thinking. And it found that compared to a traditional lecture-based instruction, that incorporating the Think-Pair-Share model into lessons improved not only students’ critical thinking, but also their engagement. There’s also benefits to their overall communication skills. The second article from 2021, it talks about how the Think-Pair-Share model impacts a student’s contribution to the lesson, and it looked at students, and particularly the more quiet students in a classroom. And it found that this model significantly improved their communication and their participation in a whole class discussion. I think you’ll see that this all makes sense since the natural structure of the Think-Pair-Share models. It allows for lower stakes in the whole class discussion because they’ve already come to their individual consensus as pairs. So they’re able to explore those topics first before you do so as a whole group or a whole class.
Okay, so now we’re going to really get into it. What is the Think-Pair-Share model? So we mentioned that it’s going to be a type of cooperative learning where we want to see the student collaboration and discourse, but then we’re going to truly define it. You no doubt have heard this in your classroom. And you probably use it in some form, but we’re going to really outline the specifics to a true Think-Pair-Share. In the simplest form, it is first prompting the students to think about a question that you’ve asked, and then they’re doing that alone, and then they’ll pair up and discuss their ideas together. So this is where that collaborative component comes in, where you really want to see the volley back and forth of ideas and discussion topics between the pair, between the two students.
So to go into this just a little bit more deeply, I want to emphasize the following steps. Okay, so there’s going to be five. First, the teacher places students in pairs and then ask a question to the whole class. Second, each individual student thinks about the answer and records the answer or solution on their paper. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a paper, but in some way you want the students to get their ideas out, some way of recording their ideas. And then once they do that, they pair and they share with each other, and based on what they’re learning at this point from their partner, they discuss additional details, and this is where you really want them to come to that consensus for the answer. And then number four is they share their answers and discuss their rationale with the whole class.
And then finally, step five. So now that you’ve heard from a few different pairs, the entire class can engage in a deeper discussion, or the teacher can help sort of summarize or recap details or ideas from the original activity. Okay. So what does this look like in practice? We’re going back to that doable in a real classroom component. So, at the end of the day, the most important part, the best work you can do on the front end is to make sure that you have a strong question. So the quality of the question is going to drive everything after that.
So for example, if a teacher says something like, “Name the three Allied Powers and the three Axis powers from World War II.” At that point, the students have a moment to think, then they pair and share. And it’s almost like at that point they’re checking each other’s work because there is a right answer. There is a very clear right answer. The question is closed, and there’s really nothing to talk about. So that’s a non-example. A strong example or an example of Think-Pair-Share implementation done correctly, done effectively, and we know, as teachers, if we’re going to do anything, we’re going to do it effectively. Again, back to getting the biggest bang for your buck with the question.
So if you frame it in a different way and you say, “So of the five factors that we discussed today, which one do you think contributed most to the end of World War II and why?” So students are really having to think this time. They’re analyzing, they’re weighing different evidence, they’re talking to each other, and they’re going to form a claim, right? And as they’re talking to their partner, there’s room for different perspectives. And this goes back to in the beginning, we talked a little bit about it can turn into a debate of sorts. And it’s low stakes, but it’s very, very poignant learning at that point. If your partners are going back and forth in a disagreement and eventually reaching a consensus, that’s going to get you back to that why part of the question.
So that justification, the negotiation, the defending their reasoning, all higher order requirements. And that’s the shift that we’re aiming for is the higher level of thinking, which is going to equal what we’re looking for, stronger student discourse. So this is just a little visual of the model in action. So in a classroom, this is what Think-Pair-Share physically looks like. The teacher is introducing the topic, talking about the question, and all of the individual students are listening to their task. And then from there, they are going to have an opportunity to grapple with that question independently. Remember, you do want some sort of method or way for them to record their answers. And then from there, you’re going to partner your students. They’re going to pair up, share their recorded ideas, and at this point, they’re going to come to a consensus. And then you can see at the end, they’re going to share out the information with the whole class. And then the teacher is going to facilitate that discussion.
Okay, so I keep repeating the importance of the questioning. So let’s look at that a little bit closer. And we’re going to talk about how to make sure that you start this activity with a strong question. What makes a strong question? And you can see there’s three different characteristics: open-ended, rigorous, and guess what? Collaborative. So first, open-ended. So you don’t want recall. You don’t want one right answer. You want them thinking and analyzing and producing responses that are possibly different than those of their classmates. They’re still grounded in the content, and there might be more than one right answer. Or a lot of times, exploring wrong answers can lead to some really powerful learning.
So second is rigorous. Everyone’s favorite word. So it goes hand in hand with being open-ended, some of those same characteristics of Not being recall. We want to go further into that depth of knowledge. We’re going to talk about application, analysis, evaluation. That’s where we really want to land. And you want students to use evidence to support their claims and make justifications, and you want them to be able to verbally justify their thinking. And last but not least, of course, it is collaborative. So it is designed to promote that collaboration. So it shouldn’t just require students to share their answer, but to require them to build ideas and challenge their thinking and have a real discussion. So all of these things, all three of these characteristics, they really work together to naturally create a very strong collaboration. Because if you think about it, when your question is open-ended and rigorous, then that’s going to lead to strong collaboration. So they’re very entangled here. I do want to take just a second to note that you’re not just going through the motions, but you have to have some sort of mechanism to check for understanding. So to check for learning, to informally assess the students’ progress and understanding and mastery of whatever the content is.
All right. So now we’re going to get to see a little bit of what it might look like in action. So there’s a few different examples across content areas, and hopefully, one of these will give you more context to think about how this would look in your classroom, how it would look in your subject area. So we’re going to start off with math. So if you just give your students a word problem and you say, “Find the area, complete the word problem, and then you’re going to partner up and check your partner’s work,” that is still a pretty closed task. There is a single right answer, and you’re not really allowing the students to think creatively or cause discussion, have one student try to justify their way of thinking compared to their partners’.
So one idea is to just give the students a visual similar to the one on the slide and tell them, determine the area. This is going to give them more than one way to enter the problem. So if you’re giving students multiple entry points, you may have a student that breaks the figure into two rectangles and finds the area and adds them together. You may have a student that finds the area of the entire square and then subtracts the missing piece. Others may use a completely different strategy. This is where you’re going to get a much richer conversation because they’re going to be not just comparing answers, but comparing their approach. And that’s where that depth of knowledge is really going to kick up a little bit.
All right. Now, for reading. Instead of saying something like, “Describe the character,” or, “List the character traits,” or, “Summarize this part. What’s the setting of the story?” Tons of examples of closed questions for reading. Another idea is to use a more open-ended question, something like, “Was so-and-so character justified in whatever decision they made?” Perhaps it was a questionable decision. Do your students think it was justified? And they have to say yes or no, and then explain their rationale to their partners. So they’re not just recalling, they’re interpreting, and hopefully, they’re going to use evidence from the text, and it is possible that they’re going to disagree.
And that’s where we talked about earlier, that disagreement is going to cause a discourse that’s going to be very valuable because they’re going to be required to come to that consensus. And let’s see, last but not least, science. Rather than asking students to list factors in plant growth, you might give them a set of data to analyze. For example, if you’re looking at this image, we’re looking at variables like light, water, temperature, and you can ask the students which factor seems to have the greatest impact on plant height. Students may come to different conclusions. Again, if you’re noticing a trend, we want that. We want that. Whether their answer is correct and incorrect between the two partners or whether they’re both correct. Again, it’s not the product, it’s not the final answer, it’s the discussion that takes place that we’re really focused on.
So we’re aiming for that shift of not just asking students to recall information, but we want them to interpret and analyze and draw conclusions, and that’s all going to lead to actual true, meaningful collaboration, not just group work. By now, we all know that, in my opinion, the question is one of the most important parts, if not the most important part of a strong Think-Pair-Share. But we’re going to take just a second and look at all of the components because again, how you structure this model is the most important part. So beginning with the think portion, we’re going to emphasize wait time, the fact that this portion is silent and independent, and you give the students an option or some means of recording their thoughts before they are going to begin that conversation with their partner. And that piece, again, that’s going back to requiring accountability.
Every student is doing the thinking, not just one partner waiting on the other partner to answer, and then they’ll regurgitate their answer if they happen to get called on. We don’t want anybody carrying the load. We want true collaboration. For the pair component of the model, let’s talk a little bit about strategic partnering. We don’t have time to go into detail about grouping, but I do want you to know that it’s important to consider the purpose of the activity. How can all of your students benefit? And it is important to make sure that you, as part of your facilitation, make those partnerships very intentionally.
A strong peer component of a Think-Pair-Share is also going to be to allow each individual student to share their thoughts independently of each other. So you’re going to have to set those expectations that you want everyone to participate, as well as truly listen and pay attention to their partners when they’re engaging in their share. Because the purpose of the peer model is for students to share their individual ideas and then come to that unified conclusion, that consensus, you’ll also want to set very clear expectations for what that will look like. So how are they going to reach a consensus? Let’s take a minute and talk about the fact that there may be a disagreement, and it is okay to disagree as long as you set expectations for how to do so respectfully.
If they do disagree with something their peer said, then you can provide them a format for recording their shared idea, or you can model what it would look like to have that disagreement. And then finally, the last feature of the pair component is that when it’s all said and done, they’ve recorded their individual responses, but you want to make sure that at the end you have some recording of their final conclusion. So their shared response needs to be recorded. Once your partnerships have reached their consensus, the next step is going to be for them to share. They’re going to share what they have determined, the conclusion that they’ve drawn, what justification that they have with the whole class. And if you think about the discourse, you want both students participating in meaningful discourse. You’re going to take that idea and sort of carry it over to the sharing. You don’t want just the blue partner to share or the high partner to share. You want to facilitate the partnership sharing as a unit.
They’re working collaboratively, so they should be able to present their ideas collaboratively. So the other thing to think about is you’ve strategically partnered your students, but now you’re going to strategically choose which students you want to share. You may choose a few of the same ideas. You may choose two conflicting ideas. We’re not going to go super deep into that facilitation of the ongoing collaboration and taking that and bringing it to the whole group level. Ideally, you have a partnership sharing in a paired fashion, and then other partnerships in the class can kind of piggyback or disagree. This takes a lot of expectation setting, modeling, practice to facilitate that whole class discussion.
So again, you’re going to have the partnerships share their thinking as a pair. And then you’re going to strategically select which partnerships you want to share and also which order you want them to share in. And then finally, we want to keep that collaboration going during the whole group discussion. It shouldn’t just be one group sharing and everyone else passively listening. You want to involve other students, asking students to respond, agree, disagree, build. There’s lots of sentence starters or different kind of scripts you can give students to agree, disagree, add, things like that. You want everyone in the room to come to that deeper understanding. And how are you going to do that?
Student discourse. Following our somewhat deep dive into the Think-Pair-Share model itself, I do want to take a second and zoom out and look at it through the teacher’s lens. We are running short on time, so forgive me, I’m going to kind of speed up a little bit here. On the teacher side, most of this comes down to your planning, being really intentional. You’re going to set clear expectations up front. How will your students talk to each other, how long they have, and how the back and forth will look. As they’re working, you are circulating, listening in. This is how you’re going to plan strategic sharing. Supporting as needed. Sometimes you might have to ask a probing question. Sometimes it’s helping a pair clarify or summarize their thinking, especially if you have a partnership that’s kind of struggling to come to that consensus.
While this is happening, you are constantly assessing. You’re using these conversations to figure out who’s getting it, who’s not, where you need to step in, what you need to adjust. Part of being that reflective practitioner, is it a you thing? Are all of the partnerships not getting it? Definitely not. I know it’s not. But truly, we always have to look at, same thing as if you have a graded multiple choice test. If everyone fails the test, then something needs to be looked at on a deeper level. If everyone is missing the mark on their answers that they’ve recorded, their consensus that they came to, then it’s important for the teacher to recognize that and be able to backtrack and intervene as necessary. So all of that is what makes the activity meaningful.
Not just the structure, but it’s what you’re doing within it that really drives the learning. So this is just a quick review of everything that we’ve discussed so far from the student side. They are going to listen attentively to the question being asked, and they’re going to record their individual responses. They are going to listen to their peer’s response and sort of evaluate it to form their own. And then if they need help, they can ask for support or clarification, and they’re going to come to a final answer. It’s important that they’re using academic language. Don’t forget they are going to come to a consensus. Remember back to the research that improved the effect. And then active participation within their partnerships as well as within the whole group discussion.
Thank you, Story, for explaining it to us a little bit more about a strong Think-Pair-Share and what it will look like in the classroom. So the quick takeaway from this webinar is that you just want to make sure you have a strong question to start. You provide your students with lots of time to think. You allow partners to discuss their ideas, and then you ensure that learning is shared aloud to the whole group. So if you’re interested in learning more about this idea as well as other collaborative learning models, you can take our Collaborative Learning Models in the Classroom course.
And for that course, you can choose to either take the eight-hour PD level course, or you could take a slightly extended version as a one-credit graduate level course instead. The course will go into more detail on how to group your students. It’ll explain six models of collaboration, including the Think-Pair-Share model that Story shared with you today. And you’ll also delve deeper into assessing and evaluating your students. So if you’re interested, you could register for the course at modelteaching.com. That’s all the time that we have today, but if you have a question about today’s webinar, you can feel free to email us anytime at courses@modelteaching.com. So this marks the end of the Model Teaching Spotlight Webinar.
If you’re interested in additional webinars that we’re going to offer in the future, you can go to our News and Events page at modelteaching.com to register. Thanks again for joining us, and enjoy the rest of your week.
