Setting Up Student Partnerships with Purpose

Purposeful student partnerships give you extra mileage all across the day. Set them up for success!

Student partnerships in a workshop classroom are so important. Not only do they lend themselves to a sense of community and cultivate a more student-centered approach, they are also a very helpful teaching tool! But how do you ensure you’re creating purposeful student partnerships?

Here are some things to consider.

A short list of ways you might use reading and writing partnerships:

  • Students converse with each other during lessons to process the learning–this allows you to listen in to everyone for a quick formative assessment, and it also ensures that EVERYONE is participating.
  • Students orally rehearse their writing together. This is a CRITICAL planning strategy. After kids have talked through their plan, they’re ready to write rather than sit at their seats and THEN try to come up with an idea or a plan. Because they’ve already gone through those steps, they are ready to write–no time wasted!
  • Peer writing support. Whether coaching each other with some revision work or helping to edit, if you have taught them to act as coaches, you’ve now multiplied the amount of teachers in the room.
  • Peer reading support. This is similar to writing support. Students might help their partner with arriving at understanding on a confusing piece of text, provide feedback on each other’s fluency, or even coach each other when book shopping to make wise decisions. Again, if you teach them how to be coaches, you’ve increased the amount of teachers in the room!
  • Talk together to build deeper understanding during interactive read alouds.
  • Talk together to help compose messages for interactive writing.
  • Practice storytelling, retelling, or summarizing to build these skills. If you coach in while students are talking, you can also use this opportunity to lift the level of their oral language structure.
  • Cheerleaders-when students compliment each other through providing academic feedback, it’s a sure-fire pride-booster. Every child deserves more of that!

Ok, those are some reasons you might have students work together in partnerships. As you can see, student partnerships can be used for many different purposes—and this is just a start!

Most of you at this point will ask:

“OK, but how do I get this going?”

This part is really very simple. I do recommend actually listing partnerships out on a chart for the first few weeks of school (or whenever new partnerships are established). This visual helps everyone quickly remember who their partners are, and what each person’s role is.

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

  • First and foremost, they have to get along. Like all partnerships, student partnerships are built on trust. So if they are oil and water, don’t try to force it. Even better if the two are actually friends! (Check out this blog post about getting to know your readers and writers).
  • Do not put an academically stronger student with an academically struggling one. This is going to cause frustration awfully quickly. And it will ensure that your stronger student continues to get stronger, because inevitably they will overpower the conversation. The whole point of partnerships is to encourage equal participation–it’s a time for both students to grow. It also creates an unspoken divide among students that is the opposite of a welcoming, inclusive community.
  • Along these same lines, multi-language (ML) learners could be partnered together if they speak the same language, although there can be so much dialect difference it’s like they speak different languages altogether. It’s usually best to set up triads in this case. This way, it might be possible to set up a group of three with the child learning English, a student who speaks that child’s same language, and an academically similar student. Even if there is only one non-native English speaker in the triad, they will still be supported by hearing the conversation. Of course, there are big differences between newcomers and MLs who have been speaking English for a few years, and that will affect the level of participation they can handle. The point is, a triad will be supportive of an ML learner. An ML learner partnered with only one native English speaker will ensure only one person is doing all the talking.
  • Set them up right away. This is a procedure that you’ll leverage all year long, so start it quickly. You’ll need to teach students how to sit beside each other, the signal for when how to move their bodies when it’s time to talk with each other, the signal for when it’s time to turn back for the lesson, and you’ll need to establish partnership roles (like Partner 1 and 2, Partner A and B, Milk and Cookies, Macaroni and Cheese, etc) so that each knows what their job is and when.
  • Consider making partner 1, who you might call to begin a conversation, the more outgoing of the two, or the one that processes more quickly. That lessens the pressure on the other child, and gives them time to gather their thoughts before sharing.
  • You can switch up partners as often as you want, but remember that partnerships are built on trust. Students will often need to be very vulnerable with each other (reason #1 they need to get along well), and that kind of trust is built over time. At the very beginning of the year, as you’re learning about your students, partnerships will change a few times until you have the right mix. But from there, it’s best if partnerships can stay together at least for the entire unit, even better if they can remain together longer. I usually kept mine together all year, but sometimes I switched them around after the first semester.
  • It’s really helpful to keep the reading and writing partnerships the same. It keeps things easier and more consistent for these two similar subjects–especially when they bleed together, which will definitely happen. Other subject areas, like math, will also utilize partnerships, but you may decide to have different groupings for this. We do have to be careful they don’t see too much of each other and that they all get to work with lots of other kids throughout the year, so definitely mix them up outside of the literacy block!

How do you plan to use purposeful student partnerships this year? Email me– I’d love to hear about it!


Want some help setting up successful student partnerships? Join my private FB group or Contact me to set up a coaching call, so we can think it through together!

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