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Cornell University

McCormick Teaching Excellence Institute

Think-Pair-Share

Think-pair-share is an active-learning exercise that encourages all students to participate and to focus on material you are teaching.

Getting Started

Try think-pair-share when you would have asked the class a question and taken a response from a single student.​ Pose the question, then:

  1. Ask students to think individually for a short time.
  2. Ask students to pair with someone sitting nearby and discuss answers with their partner.​
  3. Call on one or more students to share their answers with the whole class.

Why It’s Effective

  • The thinking time causes students to practice recall of information, thus strengthening their ability to do so again in the future.
  • The pairing time causes students to practice explaining ideas to others, which better reveals to them what they do and do not understand.
  • The sharing time gives you an opportunity to comment on common misconceptions or mistakes, and to present subtleties students might not have considered.

Hints

  • Allow adequate time for thinking and pairing. It can be tempting to cut off those phases too early. Students likely need more time to work through questions than you do.
  • Not everyone needs to share​. In a small class, try calling on the partner of a strong student​. In a large class, try using polling to have everyone share.

Online Adaptations

  • In synchronous instruction environment such as a Zoom lecture, create breakout rooms with two or three students each. A TA can help with this, so that you can focus on the lecture material. Explain to students that they will think by themselves for a minute in the main room, then they will be moved to breakout rooms to pair. Ask students to designate one person as the reporter. After the discussion phase in the breakout room ends, everyone returns to the main room. You can call on a couple of reporters to share, have the reporters post their thoughts in the chat, and/or have the reporters enter comments in a shared Google doc.
  • In an asynchronous instruction environment such as a pre-recorded lecture, you can simulate think-pair-share. Pause during the lecture to ask the student to think about a prompt. Then ask them to pair and explain out loud, or on paper, their answer to a hypothetical person in the class. Perhaps you could even encourage students to have buddies with whom they watch the lectures, in which case it wouldn’t have to be a hypothetical person. Collect all the answers for the day in an online survey, which you can then share with the class as an announcement, or in future course notes, or even in a special video that you record.