Now try Activity 2
In this activity you will plan a lesson that incorporates no more than 20 minutes of pair work. Review the example task types in Resource 1:
Using the ideas and guidance in Resource 1 and drawing on Case Studies 1 and 2, choose a topic that your students will be motivated to talk and write about. You could base it on a chapter in the class language and literacy textbook or that of another subject, a recent event in the community, or a local or national news item. Consider what your students could read for inspiration before the pair work, or what reading opportunities there might be after it.
It is important to prepare your class carefully at the start.
After you have tried out your pair work activity, review how it went. Talk to a colleague about your experience if you can. Tick any of the statements in Table 1 that applied and add any further statements of your own.
Benefits of pair work | Problems of pair work | ||
Allows for much more student talking time in the classroom than in a ‘traditional’ lesson | Students are not used to working in pairs and require a lot of support with this | ||
Encourages sociable learning and cooperation – with the possibility of making positive connections between students who don’t know each other well | Pairs may talk about other things instead of the task they’ve been assigned | ||
Encourages a variety of imaginative outputs for the same task | High noise levels | ||
Allows me to monitor and support students as they work | Partners don’t always get on with each other | ||
Pairs have different finishing times | |||
Requires a lot of teacher concentration and oversight | |||
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Some of the problems you may have experienced can be reduced by explaining the benefits of working in pairs to your students, perhaps in their home language, and by gradually familiarising them with this way of working. Plan the pairings that would be most supportive before each lesson, adapting them in accordance with your observations and to maintain a variety of working patterns. You may also invite your students’ views – positive and negative – about pair work, but it is important to handle such discussions sensitively.
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