Think-Pair-Share: A View from Both Sides

I'm learning how to teach better by being a student again

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

This semester, I’m taking a physics class at my local community college. My goal is to remember what it’s like to be a novice in a science course, so I can become a better educator and a better textbook author.

It is super interesting being in the student role again after spending years teaching, attending teaching-related conferences, participating in teaching related professional development opportunities, and reading books and papers about education. I know a lot about teaching “best practices,” but being a student again is teaching me a lot about teaching and learning in the classroom.

This semester I’ll be writing about the insights I gain by being a student again.

The “Think” in Think-Pair-Share Takes Time

In my physics class, my instructor intersperses periods of lecture with “Think-Pair-Share” activities. Think-Pair-Share is one of myriad activities to engage students in Active Learning, an approach that has been shown to increase student performance and increase equity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) classrooms. By incorporating Active Learning activities in a lecture-based course, students get to practice the hard work that builds learning (recalling concepts, solving problems, making connections, etc) while getting immediate class-wide feedback from the instructor. I’m a big fan of Active Learning and I use it in my classroom all the time.

Think-Pair-Share works like this: The instructor poses a question or problem to the class, and students take time to Think about it, then they talk with a neighbor (“Pair”), then the instructor asks one or two students to Share what they discussed. By responding to students’ discussion points, the instructor provides immediate feedback to the class, helping to clarify misconceptions, explain concepts, etc.

I use Think-Pair-Share extensively in my own classroom, but for the first time in 15 years, I’m on the student side of Think-Pair-Share.¹ Here’s what I notice.

When the instructor puts up the first Think-Pair-Share question, it takes time for my brain to switch from listening mode to thinking mode. I am an attentive student – I’m not tired during class, I’m not distracted by my phone – and still, when I’ve been sitting through a longer period (30 or 40 minutes) of the instructor talking, when she puts up the first Think-Pair-Share question, I have a moment of free-fall and I find myself asking, “Wait, what am I supposed to be doing?” It takes a little time, maybe 5-10 seconds, for my brain to settle into the mindset that I have work to do. I call this the Switch-to-Thinking-Mode time delay.

(Interestingly, when my instructor poses a series of Think-Pair-Share questions, I only experience the Switch-to-Thinking-Mode time delay for the first question in the series. As an educator, I’m quite curious whether the Switch-to-Thinking-Mode time delay is affected by how often Active Learning activities are deployed in a lecture-based class. In other words, is there a Switch-to-Thinking-Mode time delay after a 5-minute mini-lecture, or only after a 30-minute chunk of lecture? This has implications for whether it’s better to intersperse separate Active Learning Activities every few minutes in lecture, or clump them together between longer periods of lecture.)

Once I’ve gotten into “thinking mode,” it then takes time for me to think! I have to read the question on the slide (that takes time), and think about what the answer is (which also takes time). Sometimes my instructor talks after putting up the question – she’ll explain the question or relate it to something we just talked about in lecture – and when she does that, I can’t think about the question because my brain is focused on listening to her.

During my training as an educator, I learned that it’s important to allocate time for all three parts of Think-Pair-Share. But in my classroom, I know I’ve cut short the “Think” part and jumped straight to telling students to talk about the problem with their peers. But thinking takes time! And some students need more time than others to think. By carving out dedicated “thinking” time, the instructor gives all students a chance to engage meaningfully in the active learning activity, and therefore benefit from it. I knew all that intellectually, but it’s quite impactful to experience it from the student side – I will definitely be more deliberate about creating silent “thinking time” when I engage students in active learning activities in the future.

The “Pair” is Awkward When You Don’t Know Your Neighbors

For the “Pair” part of Think-Pair-Share, I’m supposed to turn to a neighbor and talk to them about the problem posed by the instructor. On a practical level, I have found this to be quite awkward – do I turn to my left or right, or talk to the person sitting in front of or behind me? Everyone is a stranger; I don’t know anyone’s name. Choosing who to talk to adds time to the Think-Pair-Share. Maybe this will become more natural and take less figuring-out time as the semester progresses, but in the first couple weeks of class, this has been awkward and clunky.

In my own classroom, I assign students to half-semester-long teams of 4-5 students. I designate a little class time in the first couple weeks for students to get to know their teammates. I hope that structuring my course this way helps reduce the barrier to talking with peers during discussion-based Active Learning activities like Think-Pair-Share. But without being a student in a course structured like that, I can only comment on what I hear from my students,² not what the experience is like from the student’s perspective.

I’m learning so much by being a student again, it’s quite fun. Oh, and I’m learning physics,³ which is also fun! I didn’t know until last week that falling objects fall faster and faster, i.e. falling is accelerating. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know that, but hey, we all have something to learn right?

Thanks for joining me on this learning journey!

Not everything you read on the internet was written by a human. For full transparency, here is how I used AI to help me write this post:

I used Claude to help me brainstorm titles and subtitles for this post. I did not use AI in any capacity to write the body of the post.

1. I have experienced Think-Pair-Share as an audience member at the education conferences I attend. My experiences in those settings are similar to my experiences as a student.

2. My students have told me that mine is the only class where they know their classmates by name.

3. I have never taken physics. Ever. I didn’t take it in high school. For my BA in Biology, I had to take either physics or statistics (I took stats). So here I am, in my 40s, learning physics for the first time!