Activity One for: Shared Power

Think – Pair – Share Activities for Middle School and High School Students

Goals:

• To introduce students to the utility of “pre-thinking” prior to a lecture and to present a collaborative strategy that can reinforce basic concepts to be presented in future lectures using electronic communication exchanges.
• To engage students to access information on the world wide web, communicate with their partner using an electronic messaging network and to provide social frameworks that facilitate classroom dialogues.

Description:

• The teacher poses one or more questions. This is done on the local web or moodle. Each student is required to read the questions and develop a written response to each question. These questions can be simple reinforcement of topics covered in class, such as how scuba diving and mountain climbing affect the volume of air in the lungs using Charles’ Law or the Ideal Gas Law, or can be broad questions designed to stimulate discussion. Examples of broad topics are listed below:

• What Determines Species Diversity?

• What causes ice ages?

• What is all that "junk" doing in our genomes?

• How do migrating organisms find their way?

• The students are paired and each pair has to produce a single response to each posted question. This can be done via email or as homework during class time. This should be a random pair assignment and the pairs should change every time so that all students get a chance to work together.
  
• Student pairs post their responses to the question set on the designated classroom website/moodle/etc.

• The teacher uses the response posts to supplement the lesson or stimulate class discussion on the selected topics. Randomly calling on students to voice their views on the topics during the lecture helps to keep the students engaged and ensures that all students are invested in the process.
• Each week’s lecture topics can get a jumpstart by this process. It will take a few times for the students to get used to the process but after doing this type of assignment they will become familiar with what needs to be done. The upcoming week’s topics can be introduced on Friday and the pairs assigned. The material has to be posted by Sunday night for the pair to get credit. Then during the week the teacher can call on the students to add what they discovered at the appropriate times during the lecture. This also allows for more topics to be introduced then can be done in just the lecture time and in greater depth.

Assessment:

· The electronic responses posted by each student pair can be analyzed by a second student pair for a variety of established criteria. These rubrics might include:

o The extent that conclusions/responses are research-informed

o The novelty/creativity expressed in the conclusions/responses

o The application of the responses/conclusions to recent/past classroom discussions OR to new/novel scenarios