And What about You? Getting Started with Interactive Pairs and Small Groups

In The Power of We: Creating Positive and Collaborative Classroom Communities (2018), Ron Nash explores the big ideas of reinventing your instructional techniques in order to rediscover your love of teaching and keep up with the interpersonal skills children need to learn in the twenty-first century. These social skills are essential to working, living, and communicating and there's no better way to teach them than collaborative learning.

And What About You? Getting Started with Interactive Pairs and Small Groups serves as a supplemental guide to The Power of We, providing the concrete steps and process considerations that make implementing interactive techniques in your classroom easy and practical. Through personal experience and expert research, Nash provides the essential guide for those teachers who don't know where to begin or feel like group work could never work in their classroom.

When teachers are willing to learn, and students are empowered to teach, the result is an extraordinary source of renewable energy for your classroom. Change can be difficult, but stagnation is unacceptable. The techniques outlined in this guide have transformed the classrooms of teachers all over the world--and what about you?

Ron Nash is a graduate of Clarion State College, now Clarion University, in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where he obtained his B. S. in Ed. and a Master of Arts in History. As a social studies teacher, Ron taught every grade level from 7 through 12 in Pennsylvania and Virginia. He served as Middle School Social Studies Coordinator for the Virginia Beach City Public Schools from 1994 to 1998, when he moved to Organizational Development for the same district. Retiring in 2007, Ron formed Ron Nash and Associates, Inc., a company dedicated to continuous improvement in schools and classrooms.

Since 1994, Ron has presented at ASCD, Learning Forward, Eric Jensen's Learning Brain Expo, and the NBPTS Conference. He has presented at dozens of state and regional conferences over the past 23 years.

Ron is the author of several books, including two bestsellers, The Active Classroom and From Seatwork to Feetwork, both in second editions. Other titles include The Active Teacher, The Active Classroom Field Book, The Active Workshop, The Active Mentor, Harness the Power of Reflection, Shake-Up Call, and Collaborative School Leadership, with Kathy Hwang.

Ron lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with his wife Candy and their two cats, Callie and Gracie.