Activity 1.10: Pair work in action

• watch the video below which shows teachers organising pair work with Grade 1 and Grade 7 students.  
• discuss the things you notice as a group
• draw on the two pieces of audio, the notes and the video to plan an activity with two or three of your colleagues, which you can try next week in your classroom. Try to include some effective questioning in your plan as well.

Classroom Example 1.3: Differentiation by task

Rita teaches Grade 6 English. She chose some words which were causing problems for learners and wrote the words and definitions on separate pieces of paper. She asked the learners to form pairs with the person next to them. This meant that they worked with a friend, and often higher attainers were together and lower attainers were together. She gave each pair ten words and ten definitions and asked them to match them up. When they had finished and she had checked them, they swapped their words and definitions with another pair.

Some pairs completed it very quickly but some found it difficult and needed a great deal of help, so it was difficult to organise. She discussed the experience with her friend, who taught Grade 4. She decided to keep the pairs how they were but gave them different sets of words. The high attainers had longer, more complex words – including some they had never met before and had to guess the meaning of – and the low attainers had shorter, more common words.

She found it worked well. The low-attainers gained confidence and learned some common words which would help them in the future, and the high-attainers were challenged to try and read and understand new words.

Classroom Example 1.4: Peer support

Changu teaches Grade 2 and her learners are beginning to read short sentences. In a literacy lesson, she wrote out some short sentences on pieces of paper. She put her children in pairs, and they practised reading the sentences aloud to each other. She had many different sentences but with similar, simple words. She was not very pleased with how it went as some of the pairs found it very difficult and some found it very easy. In the next lesson, she tried again with different sentences, but this time, she deliberately put the children in mixed-ability pairs. This worked much better as the good readers were able to help those who found it more difficult. She found that some of the slower readers gained confidence and could read the sentences, and the good readers enjoyed helping them to sound out the words.

Did you notice...

• Each of the teachers used different ways of organising their students in pairs.
• Changu used mixed ability pairs as peer support. This can really help you as a teacher of a large class.
• All the activities in these examples can be adapted for different grades.