An interesting and often useful strategy for teachers. 1) Students take time to think about their personal response to a question (I have found this works best with critical thinking); 2) Students share with another student – they share their response and their thinking process – they have an opportunity to refine and check their understanding; 3) Students or pairings share with the group their responses.
In my experience, TPS is enhanced when the pairing is not just with a random person. There are productive pairings within the Zone of Proximal Development. Two intermediate learners in the same group can support the information and understanding that they each bring to the conversation. A high level student and a low level student does not result in mutual learning – because the high level student draws little to no benefit from the low level student. The low level student will either frustrate the high level student with their lack of knowledge or the high level student will spend their time teaching the low level student and receive no parallel exchange of information. One critique of this is that it keeps low level students with low level students. However, the sharing is an essential part of the learning strategy. Here, students are exposed to the range of ideas. If the teacher solicits responses from a range of ability levels, all students get heard and the exchange of ideas is supported across levels while allowing small pairings to support each other at the same point in development.
David Orace Kelly 