Purpose
Students collaborate to coach each other about complex words, visuals, problems, questions, texts, or assessment items.
Materials
Instructions
- Organize students into groups of 4. This is their home group.
- Assign each student a different word, visual, problem, Think It Up question, text excerpt, or assessment question.
- Students get up and find others with the same topics/tasks. They huddle together to think, talk, and prepare to teach their topic/task by answering questions such as:
- Topic/Words: How can we summarize and teach this?
- Visual: If the visual could talk, what would it tell us?
- Practice Problem: What is it about? How can we solve it?
- Think It Up: How can we explain and justify our answer?
- Text: How can we summarize the most important parts?
- Test Item: How can we justify the correct answer?
- Students return to their home group of 4.
- Each one teaches one about their assigned topic or task.
- Repeat steps 3-4 until each student has taught the assigned 4 topics or tasks.
- Observe students’ thinking and clarify/verify as appropriate.
- Students summarize what they learned and note how to avoid mistakes about these topics/tasks in the future.
Classroom Management
- Role-play how to huddle with like groups and how to return to home groups to teach the assigned topic.
Differentiation
- Promote access by previewing and summarizing the 4 topics.
- Promote access to text by providing auditory, summarized, or electronic text and/or offering text in manageable chunks.
- Promote access by partnering with a supportive peer for read-alouds, allowing text-to-speech supports, or allowing visually supported text.
- Provide response support by allowing students to use audio/video support to record their teaching points and/or allowing speech-to-text or word prediction supports.
- Access language supports by proficiency level ->
Think It Up!
- Have students think more deeply about the concept by responding to a Think It Up prompt as an exit ticket or journal entry:
- What generalization can you make about all 4 questions or concepts?
- Encourage students to use lead4ward’s Thinking Stems (English/Spanish) to frame their responses, if needed.
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Read the video transcript
This instructional strategy is called Each One, Teach One. Make sure to save this for the start of the school year. Start by organizing students into groups of four. This is their home group. Assign each student in the group a different topic or task. Next, students get up and find others with the same topic or task. They huddle together to think, talk, and prepare to teach their topic or task by answering questions like these. Then students return to their home group of four. Every student then teaches their assigned topic or task to their group. Finally, students summarize what they learned and note how to avoid mistakes about these topics and tasks in the future. Follow for more instructional strategies like this one.

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