The dynamic of a lesson depends very much on the variety of social forms used (individual work, pair-work, group-work, whole-class discussion, etc.). However, students often get stuck with the same partner. Asking students to work in pairs is good, but without swapping pairs, it’s not as effective as it could be.
Here are 10 tips on how to pair up students:
- The most common way is for you (the teacher) to decide who works with whom.
- The second most common way is to let students pick their own partner — though avoid this if there are less popular students in your class.
- Collect some cards with pictures, flashcards or magazine photos and cut them in half, so that every student ends up with one piece. Ask students to choose a piece and then find their partner (the missing half). If you have an odd number of students, cut one picture into three pieces.
- Write questions and their answers on cards (as many cards as there are students) and give each student one card. They then find their partner by mingling. If there’s an odd number of students, write two possible answers for one of the questions.
- Ask students to line up in some order — for example, from tallest to shortest, alphabetically by first name, from youngest to oldest, or by birthday within the year. Then pair them up, two by two.
- Play “Find someone who…” with them, using prompts like “Find someone who can swim” or “Find someone who speaks a foreign language”. Ask students to mingle, interview each other, and find a partner. Both students should be able to answer “yes” to their partner’s question, so keep some questions easy (e.g. who lives in the city where the school is, or has a sister or brother) and make only half of them a bit more challenging (e.g. who can count to 10 in Spanish, or sing a song in English).
- Ask students to find something in common with one of their classmates while mingling. This can be something simple — “we both live in the city centre” — but they can’t repeat something another pair has already used. They keep playing until every student has found a partner.
- Before the class arrives, line up the chairs in two rows facing each other, and let the arriving students sit wherever they like. Friends tend to sit next to each other. At this point, ask them to work with the student sitting opposite them.
- Ask students to choose a classmate they’ve never worked with before. Over time, every student should end up having worked with everyone else in the class.
- Ask students to open their books at any page and tell you the page number. You can then pair students with an odd page number with those who have an even page number, or pair them up based on proximity of page numbers (from lowest to highest).
Small things like this can often add some spice to your lesson — for example, doing the next exercise with a new partner. By swapping students around, you can also experiment to see which pairings work particularly well together or help each other.
You can also adapt some of these tips to form small groups out of a larger class.