We continue our focus on preventing seclusion with our vlog this week.  As I've said over the past few weeks, when I'm out visiting schools and classrooms, I often see students (not just English learners) who never participate or engage with other students.  Our newcomers tend to be shy and the best way for us to get them to speak and practice the language and content is through safe interaction routines.

Today I challenge you to think about the simple strategy of Think, Pair, Share.  How can you add some additional structure, support, and clear expectations to a Think, Pair, Share in order to get everyone involved?

In this video, I use a structured Think, Pair, Share to focus students on the language we use to identify character traits and cite evidence from the text.  There is no "one way" to encourage student to student interaction and discourse, so I hope this one example helps spark some ideas for you. 

The key steps include attention to word with a quick vocabulary review, attention to sentence with starters/frames and modeling to guide the conversation, and time to speak to each other before and during writing (discourse).  

I welcome your feedback and any ideas you'd like to share on how you structure your Think, Pair, Share to get more bang for your buck!