Organising Group Talk

Pairs

Easy to organise and high participation, very useful for planning but will take a long time if each pair is expected to feed back to the class.

Triads

Again easy to organise but care needed to prevent 'lurking'. Best to assign each group member a role eg. talker, questioner and recorder. The talker presents their case, the questioner seeks clarification and the recorder takes notes and reports on discussion.

Pairs to Fours

Useful to compare and explain ideas before generating feedback for the rest of the class.

Envoys

Once a group has carried out a task, one person from each group moves to another to report on their group's conclusions and to find out what the other group decided and achieved. The envoy then returns to their original group to feed back the new information. This effectively avoids repetitive feedback to the whole class.
 

 Role Play