Talk partners

Helen McDonnell:

The idea is that one child is slightly higher ability than the other. They are helping, scaffolding the work for their partner, while also helping themselves by having to verbalise, to explain to their partner, who may be struggling. It's meant to be a relationship which is beneficial to both partners. It's good for social and personal skills, we wouldn't just put friends together. It does help children to get to know other children in the class.

Talk partners change throughout the year. It's particularly useful because of our high proportion of children with English as a second language. It encourages them to talk and have confidence. They each have to practise their sentence first and come up with an answer to a question. Hopefully that makes them more confident to say it out loud if they are asked to speak to the whole class.

In the 'Postcards Home' project they often had to present their work and ideas to the whole class and the system of talk partners helped.