My students sit in pairs in my classroom. Sometimes we do activities where I have each student try to be faster than their seatbuddy. For example, we will take the whiteboards and I will say a vocabulary word and whoever writes it correctly and holds the board up first is the winner of the round. While I love adding a competitive element at times--and making the students try to respond quickly because in real life conversations you don't have five minutes to come up with a sentence--I know that there are some pairings where one student is significantly stronger than the partner. (I even heard one boy say that he was going to lose a lot when I announced the racing activity this week.)
I don't want students to feel defeated before I even ask the first question, so I have come up with two adaptations to try to keep things competitive.
1. After a few questions I have students switch partners. Sometimes it's very open-ended who goes and finds a new partner; other times I control where the students go so that they end up in more equal-ability pairings.
2. The student who won the last round has a 5-count "handicap." They have to count to five before they can start writing their answer while the partner can start right away. Every round in a row that is won adds 5 more to the count. Once the other student wins, the first winner goes back to 0 for their counting. This technique worked really well for my Spanish III class as they practiced conditional conjugations, and I loved hearing them try to count quickly!
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