Benefits of APT

Fostering Engagement and Increasing Attention

One of the greatest challenges of teaching is keeping students focused and engaged in learning. Engagement increases when students are listened to, particularly by their peers. Giving students the opportunity to interact makes the learning experience much more positive, as can be seen in these three video clips. 

The following three video clips show activities that could have been done individually, but instead students are working with partners.

As you watch the video, consider how talking through the answers in pairs might enhance the students’ learning. 

Students have just finished reading a script in which four fourth-grade characters are discussing a fifth character who broke the rules in a national park by picking flowers for his sick mother. In the script, the characters offer their opinions on whether it was acceptable for their friend to break the rule given that it was for a good cause.

The clip above is from:

When is it Acceptable to Break the Rules? Character Perspectives

Language Arts • Grade 4

  • Things to notice

    As they went about the activity, students explained their thinking to each other and built on each other’s ideas. Students may well have gotten the same answers to the questions in the workbook if they had worked independently, but the fact that they are moving through the task together focuses their attention. Students are more engaged with the subject matter making it a better learning experience.


    As students talked through supporting evidence, they used vocabulary from the text (for example, acceptable, apprehended). Research suggests that learning new vocabulary successfully requires that the words be actively used. [4]


    In the whole class context, only one student can speak at a time, severely limiting students’ opportunities to practice speaking the words. That opportunity is vastly increased when students talk in pairs or small groups. Students also get practice reading aloud to one another, an important activity in the elementary grades that requires listening ears—conveniently provided by the student’s partner. 


    The unit will later require students to choose a position themselves and make and defend an argument for that position, but the short term goal here is to simply establish a shared understanding of what each of the characters believes. 

Imagine yourself as one or the other of the students. How does working with another student change your learning experience?

The teacher has given each pair of students the same set of words, but has left it up to the student pairs to decide how to categorize the words. Prior to the start of this clip, the teacher had asked the whole class about possible ways that the words might be sorted. Students suggested categories that included either similar word features (such as double vowels) or related meanings. 

The clip above is from:

Categorizing Words that end with -ING

Language Arts • Grade 2

  • Things to notice

    The students decide that “things that are annoying” is a worthwhile category, and as a result their interaction increases the nuance in their thinking. When one student says “raining” is annoying, the other disagrees. So “annoying” is in the eye of the beholder. Their interaction also leads to the observation that something that is not intrinsically annoying—waving—can be made to be annoying, happily demonstrated by one student waving the other’s hand for her (which she agrees was annoying). 


    In addition to staying engaged in the task, the students are developing the kind of conditional thinking (waving can be annoying or not depending on how it is being done) and precision (snapping and waving communicate and are normal actions, but we can’t call them “speaking”) that sharpen students’ analytical skills over time. 


    Notice the activity level of the boy in this pair; he would likely struggle if he had to sit quietly for very long, and may find keeping his focus challenging if he was working alone. But in interaction with his partner, he has good ideas to offer. His partner is also developing her interaction skills; she is able to assert herself at the start, letting him know that this was a shared activity, and the word strips belonged to both of them. 

Can discussion be adopted as a norm in a mathematics class?

The student opens up the conversation by asking her peers what answer they arrived at, and more importantly how they got there. Initially, the students believe they have the correct answer and are done with the task. Upon further discussion, they realize they may not have the correct answer and look back at their materials. 

The clip above is from:

Simplifying Logarithms

Math • High School Algebra II

  • Things to notice

    Being readily able to reference the materials shows the emphasis is not on the memorization of rules, but on understanding how they apply in different situations. The conversation deepens beyond the current task as students ask their peers what they would do if the log involved exponents.


    Discussion has been adopted as a norm in this mathematics class. It is a tool students use for making sense of mathematics as they explain their thinking and question the thinking of their peers. On the surface, this seems as if it is not the most group- or discussion- worthy task as they are asked to simply apply the rules of logs. The students could have found the answer and sat silently waiting for the whole class debrief to begin. However, their small group discussion furthers their understanding of the math concept at hand.