Student talk is pivotal for learning across all ages, fostering engagement and understanding.
Talk partners are pre-determined partners to have learning conversations with when instructed by the teacher. Among other benefits, talk partners have the potential to increase the sharing of knowledge within a class and reduce the anxiety some students feel when choosing partners.
How do you currently choose talk partners?
Do students self-select? It will come as no surprise that when students select partners, some may consistently be left out which can cause social stress and anxiety. Students are also most likely to self-select their friends or social groups with whom they already share knowledge. How might you group students to support ‘knowledge mobility’ beyond the social groups in your class?
Do you strategically choose? Do you deliberately put a ‘talker’ with a reluctant talker? Do you group to manage behaviour? “Students by and large, know why they are being placed with certain other students, and they live down to these expectations.” (Liljedahl, 2021, p.42)
Or, do you implement “frequent and visibly random groupings” (Liljedahl, 2021, p.44) Liljedahl in ‘Building Thinking classrooms in mathematics’ emphasises that frequently changing groupings decreases the roles within groups calcifying. How often might you change talk partners? What might be the clues it is time for a change of partner?
Making the grouping or pairing visibly random to the students supports students' belief that the groups are truly random, and not for some other purpose by the teacher (Liljedahl, 2021, p.44). A google search will show various ways of making the randomising visible, varying from pulling names out of a container, matching images (opportunity for some movement here) or free random group generators. Keep in mind how students might respond to their new partner or group and how you might teach them to be open and welcoming in their words and actions.
Idea 1: Displaying the partners
As names are randomly selected where might you keep a public record of the partnerships. In Figure 1 the students' names are pulled out of a hat (literally a hat) and added to the images. Other classes make a list on a poster or have students write their partner in their learning journal. Some classes change the seating or where students sit on the floor to make partner talk easier.
Figure 1
Idea 2: Pre-organising multiple partners
In this class the teacher wanted to set up partnerships in various ways and be able to select partners for multiple learning purposes. As you can see in Figure 2, each partnership is given a shape name, “Find your star partner and talk about…”. You can see three different ways of making partners including teacher choice, student choice and the randomiser. For the arrow partner, the teacher asked students to nominate 3 students they would choose to be their partner and allocated partners from there to decrease social anxiety. The teacher displayed all partnerships in a grid.
Figure 2
Another idea!
You can find a range of random group generators here.
References:
Liljedahl, P. (2021). Building thinking classrooms in mathematics, grades K-12 : 14 teaching practices for enhancing learning. Sage Publications Inc.
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