Information Age Education

Teaching Strategy: Think Pair Share Hand Signals Video

Watch this YouTube video to learn Think-Pair-Share learn hand signals to make this activities even more fun and easy to manage. Read my post on Think-Pair-Share-Write activities for more information on creating and using them in your classroom.

Note: YouTube is often blocked by school servers.

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Add comment January 21st, 2007

Think-Pair-Share-Write: Make It a Think-Pair-Share-Blog

A great teaching technique for engaging students, supporting language develop and addressing multiple intelligences is doing a Think Pair Share activity.

It’s easy to take something that you already do and transform it into a Think-Pair-Share. Occasionally I do Think-Pair-Share-Write activities and lately we’ve been playing with it as a Think-Pair-Share-Blog. The students love Think-Pair-Share activities and it engages a wide range of learners in the discussion. It doesn’t take any additional time to make. Here’s how to do it.

Think-Pair-Share-Write
1. Show students one question. It can be from a textbook, handout or overhead.
2. Have them think about it quietly, providing adequate “wait time.” (This is often around 7 second, which can feel like eternity sometimes.)
3. Then have them pair up with someone to discuss the idea.
4. Let students share their responses with the class.
5. Students write their responses.
6. Repeat the process with another question.

Think-Pair-Share-Blog
I have one computer in the class.Before class, enter one of the questions on the class blog site. I do the exact same process as above, and have one student enter the response onto the blog.

Choosing who gets to blog:
1. Sometimes I just pick a student. Since they’ve thought about it, discussed it in pairs and heard from the class, the quality of the answer is usually fairly reliable.
2. Several students will “share” with the class and I write down their names and an abbreviated response. The class votes with their fingers on the response they prefer. One finger for the first response, 2 for the second and so on. I usually only have 2-3 students share out.

Check the video I made showing the Think-Pair-Share hand signals that the originator of the Think-Pair-Share method, Dr. Frank Lyman, uses. I actually knew Dr. Lyman when I was a student in high school county student government. He worked at the Howard County Office of Education in Maryland. 20 years later I met him again when he spoke at my master’s program at the University of Maryland at College Park. I didn’t know that he created both “Think-Pair-Share” and “wait time.” How cool is that!

My students love Think-Pair-Share activities. I’m not sure which they like more the activity or the hand signals. I know the hand signals are a big hit with them.

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7 comments January 18th, 2007