Not All Pair-Share is Created Equal

 Everyone knows that when students are given opportunities to collaborate and discuss what they are learning, they will retain that learning at deeper levels.  Over the past decade there has been an engagement wave building around kids interacting with other students in class. More and more, we see teachers assigning elbow partners or pair-share partners and are asking students to collaborate during class.  This is great right?  Exactly what we want? 

Not always.

Any student to student interaction in class needs to be meaningful and purposeful.   If a student can easily answer a question or a prompt without needing the help of another student, it may not be purposeful for the students to pair-share.  If the question or prompt does not require some deeper or more cognitively demanding thinking, the pair-share does not carry as much meaning.

Questions and prompts designed for pair-share need to be predetermined and constructed in a way that includes opportunities for students to use academic language in collaborative and meaningful ways.  

Time dedicated to pair-share should be appropriate to the task and create a sense of urgency for students to interact.

Low Quality Pair-Share Examples	Higher Quality Pair-Share Examples
Turn to your partner and tell them the letter.	Turn to your partner and tell them how you can tell the difference between the letter “b” and “d”.
Talk to your elbow partner about that.	Talk to your elbow partner about the change in the main character’s  motivation.
Turn to your neighbor and tell them if the number is prime or composite.	Turn to your neighbor and explain why you know that number is prime or composite.

While we need to continually plan opportunities for students to interact and use academic language in our classrooms, we need to strive to be more purposeful and meaningful in the questions or prompts we create.