Many students in Alec Brown’s grade 9 College Reading class are English learners or designated for special education. Some of the texts Alec uses are difficult for his students. When the assignment was to read text chunks of several paragraphs at a time, Talk to the Text, and then share their connections, questions, and roadblocks with a partner, Alec found that about 20 percent of the students were off task. The task was too hard.

As Alec reported early in the school year, “I wanted to just give up on the partner work. There were always three or four partnerships that didn’t do anything or they just fooled around. I was feeling out of control.”

However, instead of reverting to the comfort of whole group instruction with the teacher in charge, Alec decided to restructure the partner task. He shortened the text chunks that partners would discuss, he partnered inexperienced readers or English speakers with students who could help them, and he changed the Talking to the Text directions. The result was “say something.”

“I think of this as scaffolding,” he explains. “I give them a paragraph at a time and ask them to write down anything that comes to mind—to ‘say something’ about the text. Then they share this with a partner and annotate their own text with what their partner wrote. Today, every student read and wrote something, and a lot of students who never volunteered before were part of the class discussion.”

“My goal is to build from here, so that we are doing at least three rounds of Think-Pair-Share per lesson.”

A month later, Alec’s students appeared to have made the transition. Every student could be observed reading, writing, and sharing his or her thinking with a partner. All students were on task.