Student Contributor: S. Myklebust
I wanted to include more ways for students to share their thinking, other than think-pair-share. Having students talk in pairs is great to share their knowledge, but sometimes in a kindergarten classroom, students can get distracted and off topic when sharing with their friend. With whisper in hand, students can share their understanding, by whispering the answer in their hand, and then releasing the answer.
This tool works best during math. Students are asked to whisper the answer to a question in their hand and release the answer once everyone has whispered it to themselves. As students release the answer, they show it with their fingers. So, an example would be, I ask the students what 4-2 is, students have time to think, they whisper “2” in their hand, then when I say release, they show me 2 on their fingers. I found this was extremely helpful during math, as I could quickly scan to see if students were understanding the math content, by looking at the answers they were showing on their fingers. I found the whisper part to be a better alternative to simply asking the students to show the answer with their fingers, because whispering allows students more time to think, and not look at other students’ answers. This could work with ELA as well, if you are working with some form of a multiple-choice question, such as which spelling of the word is correct, and students whisper option 1,2 or 3, then show with their fingers the answer.
To support students in sharing their understanding, you can use the whisper in hand method for sharing student thinking, as well as assess where students are in their understanding. This tools best fits with the supportive phase, as it helps keep learning engaging for students, and allows the teacher to assess students understanding. This tool can also fit with the preventive phase, as it can prevent students from getting off topic and chatting with their friend and prevents students from shouting out the answer right away, when other students need more time to think. I would say the whisper in hand falls under the collaborative theory because the teacher directs the students in answering the question, but students have the responsibility of sharing their understanding.
More Information –
Tool Source: I got this idea from my supervisor, Clive Dale, who was helping me come up with ways to sequence my lesson.
I tried this management tool in my rural, first-grade classroom with 19 students. I tried using this tool in several different subjects and I think it worked efficiently in all of them. I have several students who have a very hard time not blurting out the answer during our think time and so being able to whisper the answer into their hand really helped allow more think time for the other students. This was a very easy tool to implement right away, the directions for the students are very simple and it doesn’t shake the routine of the classroom. When I first did it, I expected the students to not whisper quietly which would defeat the point but, to my surprise they did a great job of following the directions of saying it quietly. I also added when giving the directions to the students to pretend their hand was a microphone and so they were whispering it into a microphone they were holding just to add some more fun to it.