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Think-Pair-Share In Community Circles

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Circles: Think-Pair-Share in Community Circles

On one of my first formal teacher evaluations, my principal noted that he wanted me to work on time management. Many years later, I still occasionally struggle with this. I tend to overplan my class periods and overestimate my students abilities to transition and complete activities. This challenge is especially apparent when I am leading community circles.

As I have previously mentioned, my classes begin with daily proactive restorative circles, also known as community circles. (If you missed the post, you can check it out here.) When planning my semester and weekly lesson plan, I reserve ten to fifteen minutes per period or block for the meetings. However, my students and I really enjoy these meetings and it is very easy for us to subconsciously to stretch them out, especially on days when we have challenging lessons, such drafting essays, or on days when the prompt evokes long-winded …show more content…

I used my phone to time the students’ responses, but I honestly almost immediately began to give each student twenty seconds of speaking time because I hated cutting them off mid-sentence. The year my school switched to block schedules, I discarded the timer completely. But, I soon realized that the meeting times kept extending--some could even take up to 25 or 30 instructional minutes if I was not careful!

Fortunately, my friend, Tracy Makings who was an Instructional Coach at the time, noticed this time management problem and made a suggestion that actually helped to speed up the circles. She suggested incorporating the think-pair-share strategy. In think-pair-share, all students take turns responding to the prompt with a partner.
Prompt: What would you do if you ran our school?
Student A to Student B: I would…..
Student B to Student A: I

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