How TPS Has Enhanced Education

These days, the American classroom experience has been enhanced with the introduction of mobile devices into the classrooms. From pre-school to graduate school, technology has taken center stage in every aspect of education. In fact, a study by the Pew Research Center survey revealed that 58 percent of all American teachers own and use smartphones. Also, with the bring-your-own-device policies, these teachers ensure that they build tech-savvy solutions into their lesson plan. Further, they are advocating that every student should have an iPad. It is a fact that these devices when used in the right way can add value to education. These days, even tools like Think-Pair-Share have been developed to help in boosting classroom instructions. And if you thought that they are only a flashy way of accomplishing things just like analog instructions, then think again.

Think-Pair-Share, also abbreviated as TPS, enables students to work together collaboratively in solving problems and answering questions on assigned reading. The students are required to think about a specific topic or answer a specified question individually. Next, they are expected to share the ideas or answers with the rest of the classmates. While a student discusses a solution to a problem with fellow students, participation is maximized, attentiveness is obtained and above all, the students are inclined to comprehend that reading material better.

What Are The Benefits Of Using This Tool?

It is recommended that students get many opportunities to talk in linguistically rich environments. When they have many of these opportunities to elaborate on ideas through speaking, learning is enhanced. With this tool, personal communication that is paramount for students to process, organize or retain concepts is also enhanced. It should be understood that a student will own their learning and negotiate meaning better when they share ideas as opposed to relying solely on the teacher’s authority. When teachers use this as one of their class discussion strategies, it would be unimaginable what importance this would have towards the students’ learning.

This tool is also known to raise student’s self-esteem as they listen and respect one another’s ideas. The students will learn more when listening to other students with high-level thinking skills. After gaining confidence, they can report to the rest of the class confidently. The tools have the ‘pair’ part which makes sure that every student participates in a discussion. In the end, classroom discussions become productive and engaging since all students get an opportunity to think over their ideas critically before articulating them to the rest of the class for discussions.

How to Create and Use a Strategy

It is the teacher who decides the text to be read or develop questions or prompts to a target key content concept. They then describe the purpose of that strategy and provide the guideline for the discussion. It is the role of the teacher to ensure that students have understood how the strategy is used and also monitor and support them as the students work.

Variation

Variation strategy is open for teachers to modify it to include different writing components within the TPS strategy. This enables the teachers to know whenever there are comprehension-related problems. After this, they create a Read-Write-Pair-Share R.W.P.S for students to read assigned content, write their thoughts, pair with partner, and share with the class.