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1. PEBC Teaching Framework - Workshop.pdf

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Article: Pro ~ Con: Should College Athletes Get Paid?

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Article: Pro ~ Con: Should College Athletes Get Paid?

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ARCHIVED WEBSITE

This topic was archived on Mar. 22, 2024, in light of recent developments. A reconsideration of the topic is possible in the future.

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) is a nonprofit organization formed in 1906 that regulates college athletics, including game rules, athlete eligibility, and college tournaments. As of Mar. 2021, the NCAA was composed of "[n]early half a million college athletes [who] make up the 19,886 teams that send more than 57,661 participants to compete each year in the NCAA's 90 championships in 24 sports across 3 divisions."

The NCAA is seemingly the final authority to decide whether college athletes should be paid to play college sports. However, in 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Fair Play Act that allows college athletes to hire agents, sign endorsement deals, and be paid for the use of their likeness.

California was the first state to pass a NIL (name, image, and likeness) law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2023. But California was quickly followed by more states. As of June 10, 2021, 18 states have passed NIL laws; five more states have passed bills that were awaiting the governor's signature to become law; 14 states have introduced NIL bills; and one state has a bill passed by the Senate and awaiting a House vote, according to the Business of College Sports.

The NCAA was scheduled to vote on new NIL rules in Jan. 2021, but it then postponed the vote, citing "external factors." Days before the scheduled vote Makan Delrahim, JD, Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice under the Trump administration, questioned the proposed rules' compliance with antitrust laws.

Additionally, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case (National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Shawne Alston, et al.) about whether the NCAA is violating antitrust laws by restricting college athletes' compensation. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Mar. 31, 2021 as the NCAA March Madness tournament heads into Final Four games just days later on Apr. 3. Respondents were split 50/50 in a June 1, 2021 New York Times survey about whether the NCAA strictly limiting paid compensation is constitutional.

Gabe Feldman, JD, Professor of Sports Law, Director of the Sports Law Program and Associate Provost for NCAA compliance at Tulane University, noted that the last time the NCAA was at the Supreme Court was in 1984 (NCAA vs. the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma). The ruling changed the broadcast regulations for college football. Feldman explained, "That was a shape-shifting decision that in many ways fundamentally changed economics of college football and college football television. And ever since that 1984 decision, courts have been relying on that language to try to interpret antitrust law applies to all NCAA restrictions, including player compensation."

On June 21, 2021, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the NCAA cannot ban certain payments to student athletes under the premise of maintaining amateurism. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, stated, "traditions alone cannot justify the NCAA's decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated. Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law."

On June 28, 2021, the NCAA Division I Council recommended to the NCAA Division I Board of Directors that student athletes be allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness. Schools would not be allowed to pay students and no one could offer compensation for students to attend a particular school. If adopted, the rule would only apply to Division I schools and would be temporary until the NCAA or Congress acts.

On June 30, 2021, fewer than 12 hours before some states' NIL laws went into effect, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors issued an interim ruling stating that Bylaw 12 (the rules that say athletes cannot receive payment) will not be enforced. Divisions II and III of the NCAA followed suit and the changes went into effect for all three divisions on July 1, 2021.

The University of North Carolina became the first school to organize group licensing deals for student athletes in July 2021. UNC athletes will be able to earn money for NIL marketing including UNC trademarks and logos in groups of three or more athletes. For example, a student athlete will be compensated for the sale of a jersey featuring their name, or for a sponsorship deal in which they appear wearing a UNC jersey. Group licensing deals in theory can allow lesser-known players to reap the benefits of appearing alongside a well-known player.

By Jan. 2022, without a clear NIL structure from the NCAA, some schools were questioning how to navigate deals for players or whole teams without violating NCAA policy.

NCAA president Charlie Baker sent a letter on Dec. 5, 2023, to the 362 Division I member schools calling for reformations including creating a separate division for the top-earning schools that would mimic professional sports and updating NIL regulations so female athletes could better benefit. The rule changes will have to be considered by the NCAA governing boards, a process which could take up to a year.

A 2019 Seton Hall Sports Poll found that 60% of those surveyed agreed that college athletes should be allowed compensation for their name, image, and/or likeness, while 32% disagreed, and 8% were unsure. This was quite a change from polling conducted in 2017, when 60% believed college scholarships were enough compensation for college athletes.

Should Colleges and Universities Pay College Athletes?

Pro 1

The NCAA, colleges, and universities profit unfairly from the work and likenesses of college athletes.

The NCAA reported over $1.06 billion in revenue in 2017 (the most recent available numbers). In 2018, NCAA president Mark Emmert was paid more than $2.7 million. Nine other NCAA executives were paid more than $500,000 in 2018, with one paid more than $1.3 million.

Michael Sokolove, author of The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino (2018), explained, "If you look at a program like [University of] Louisville, ...they generate about $45 million a year in revenue. They give out 13 scholarships. That adds up to about $400,000 a year. The rest of it gets spread out to the coach, who makes $8 million a year, to the assistant coaches, who make as much as a half-million dollars a year. All throughout the athletic department, people are making six-figure salaries. It does not go to the players, what I call the unpaid workforce."

As of Nov. 17, 2020, the University of Alabama head football coach Nick Saban was the highest paid NCAA college football coach, making $9.3 million per year. 81 other head football coaches made more than $1 million annually and another 29 more than $500,000.

The highest paid men's basketball coach was the University of Kentucky head coach, John Calipari, who was paid $8.2 million per year. 69 other head men's basketball coaches were paid more than $1 million annually, and another three more than $500,000.

Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who was forecast to earn about $11 million in 2023, says, "I would take less money for the players to have a share. I hope other coaches would use their voice to express the same thing."

College athletes, arguably the stars of the show who earn millions year after year for the well-paid NCAA executives, coaches, and staff, were forbidden by the NCAA from not only being paid for their work-, but from seeking other related compensation such as endorsement deals. And, as John I. Jenkins and Jack Swarbrick, President and Athletics Director of Notre Dame University argue, "We have been vocal in our conviction that student-athletes should be allowed to... profit from their celebrity - for one simple reason: Other students are allowed to. If a college student is a talented artist or musician no one begrudges him the chance to make money from his skills. And athletes should as far as possible have the opportunities other students enjoy."
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Pro 2

College athletes are risking their bodies as well as their future careers and earning potential to play for colleges and universities while often receiving a sub-par education.

Governor of California Gavin Newsom, stated, "Collegiate student athletes put everything on the line - their physical health, future career prospects and years of their lives to compete. Colleges reap billions from these student athletes' sacrifices and success but, in the same breath, block them from earning a single dollar. That's a bankrupt model."

Zachary Kerr, PhD, Researcher at the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, stated, "I definitely think research indicates strong evidence that injuries during one's sports career can potentially be associated with adverse health outcomes later in life."

In 2017, 67% of former Division I athletes had sustained a major injury and 50% had chronic injuries, 2.5% higher than non-athletes.

Azmatullah Hussaini, MD, President of the New York/New Jersey chapter of the American Muslim Health Professionals, and Jules Lipoff, MD, Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, offered additional context: especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, "[g]iven that athletes are disproportionately Black in the biggest revenue-generating sports - football and basketball - this dynamic also evokes America's horrific history of unpaid slave labor. It's hard to ignore the racist undertones when the financial benefit to these institutions is based on the unpaid work of young Black men."

The NCAA requires players to have health insurance but does not pay for that insurance and can refuse to pay medical expenses for sports injuries, some of which can have life-long consequences for the players' bodies and career opportunities. The NCAA also does not prohibit schools from canceling injured athletes' scholarships, leaving athletes without a sport or education.

Adding insult to sometimes literal injury, college athletes are also frequently denied the NCAA's other form of "compensation": a quality education. As Jon Solomon, Editorial Director for the Sports and Society Program at the Aspen Institute explained, "The most glaring example occurred when the University of North Carolina was found by outside parties to have organized fake classes that enabled dozens of athletes to gain and maintain their eligibility... of the 3,100 students who took the fake classes over 18 years, 47.4 percent were athletes... North Carolina avoided NCAA penalties by essentially arguing that the NCAA should stay out of irregularities in college courses." The NCAA polices athletes' finances but does not ensure a quality education.
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Pro 3

College athletes are often valued at more than $1 million, but they (and their families) frequently live below the poverty line.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the top two college football positions-the quarterback and wide receiver-were worth $2.4 million and $1.3 million per year respectively, while starting men's basketball players in the Power Five schools were worth between $800,000 and $1.2 million per year.

If college players earned about 50% of their teams' revenues like the NFL and NBA players do, the average football player's yearly salary would be $360,000 and the average basketball player's yearly salary would be $500,000.

The study found that "[t]he player-level analysis reveals that the existing limits on player compensation effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods towards students who are more likely to be white and come from higher-income neighborhoods."

College athletes are required to make up the difference between NCAA scholarships and the actual cost of living. Tuition shortfalls amount to thousands of dollars per year and leave about 85% of players to live below the poverty line. For example, fair market value for a University of Texas football player was $513,922. However, players lived $778 below the federal poverty line and owed $3,624 in tuition.

About 25% of Division I athletes reported food poverty in the past year and almost 14% reported being homeless in the past year. Erin McGeoy, a former water polo athlete at George Washington University, explained, "a common occurrence was that we would run out of meal money halfway through the semester and that's when I started to run into troubles of food insecurity." She turned to boarding dogs in her no-dogs-allowed apartment in order to pay rent because housing costs increased each year but her housing allowance remained static.

The NCAA keeps players in poverty and denied them ways to earn money, while making millions on their performance.
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Con 1

Scholarships are fair financial compensation for college athletes, especially considering the precarious finances of athletic departments.

According to the NCAA, the organization provides "more than $3.6 billion in athletic scholarships annually to more than 180,000 student-athletes." Divided equitably, each student would receive about $20,000 per year. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average total cost of public college (tuition, fees, room, and board) for the 2017-18 academic year was $17,797. Considering other scholarships and aid are widely available and not all college athletes require financial aid, the NCAA scholarships are generous.

Further, most college programs do not generate the income needed to run their athletic programs, much less pay athletes. In fiscal year 2019, the collective expenses of the 65 Power Five schools-the largest and richest Division I schools in the NCAA-exceeded revenue by $7 million. Other Division I schools had an almost $23 million collective difference between revenue and expenses. No Division II or III schools' revenue exceeded expenses.

If students were paid, the NCAA argues, many colleges and universities would have to offer fewer scholarships and the remaining scholarships would be distributed unfairly to top football and men's basketball players because those two sports bring in the most revenue. Schools would also have to cut unprofitable sports including gymnastics, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and wrestling. Discrepancies between men's and women's sports such as the weight room during the 2021 NCAA basketball tournament would only worsen.

Paying players would also limit the literal and figurative playing fields to elite universities with large budgets. As John Thelin, PhD, Research Professor of History of Higher Education & Public Policy at the University of Kentucky, explained, "paying salaries to players will increase [athletic] program expenditures without necessarily increasing revenues... [and] a handful of powerful programs will stand to gain in competition for athletic talent simply because they can afford to pay salaries. Others will mimic as they try to keep up but eventually will fall short in trying to outbid Auburn University, Florida State, the University of Southern California or the University of Texas in the college player arms race."
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Con 2

Very few college athletes will go pro, so athletes should take advantage of the education being offered in exchange for playing a college sport.

The reality is that the vast majority of college athletes will never play professionally. Of the 36,011 college baseball players, only 8,002 are eligible to play professionally each year. 1,217 will be draft picks, but only 791 will be drafted yearly, meaning about 9.9% of college baseball players will go pro, which is the largest likelihood in NCAA sports.

The major money-makers, football and men's basketball, have very low odds. Of the 73,712 NCAA football players, about 16,380 are draft-eligible and 254 will be drafted, meaning about 1.2% of college football players will go pro. Of the 18,816 male basketball players, 4,181 are draft-eligible and 60 will be drafted, but only 52 will go pro, or a 1.2% chance a college basketball player will play professionally. The odds are even lower for women's basketball at 0.6%.

The NCAA noted, "[p]rofessional opportunities are extremely limited and the likelihood of a high school or even college athlete becoming a professional athlete is very low. In contrast, the likelihood of an NCAA athlete earning a college degree is significantly greater; graduation success rates are 86% in Division I, 71% in Division II and 87% in Division III."

In other words, it would be more prudent and more profitable for college athletes to focus on education as their compensation.

Data analyzed from the Department of Labor showed nine out of 10 new jobs were going to employees with college degrees in June 2018. Further, a Gallup poll of "74,385 U.S. adults with a bachelor's degree, finds that college graduates who participated in NCAA athletics experience a host of positive long-term life outcomes at greater rates than non-athletes."

Those positive outcomes include: 70% of NCAA athletes graduated in four years or fewer, 50% agree that college was worth the cost, 39% earned an advanced degree, 33% have "good" jobs after graduation, and 24%
"are thriving at the highest levels," all higher percentages than their non-athlete peers.

Amy Perko, CEO of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, said of the Gallup findings, "It's a positive report for the educational benefits for college sports, and it reinforces the point that we've tried to make over the years. There's an important role for college sports in higher education, and that role needs to be placed in the proper perspective as part of the educational mission, not apart from it."
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Con 3

Paying college athletes would not solve the real problem: the American amateur sports system is broken.

Football and basketball players cannot play professionally immediately after high school. The NBA requires players to be at least 19 and a year out of high school, while the NFL requires players to be three years out of high school. These rules can effectively limit players' options to playing in college or choosing another profession altogether. Most players have no real "amateur" sport option and those who would rather not go to college have no other established feeder system to make it to a professional team.

Further confusing the issue, the NCAA does not have a consistent or fair definition of "amateurism" and allows some significant forms of financial compensation. College athletes are allowed to compete in the Olympic Games and be financially compensated, such as Joseph Schooling, a University of Texas swimmer, who earned a $740,000 bonus for winning Singapore's first gold medal ever at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games for the 100m butterfly. College athletes may also play a second sport professionally and be compensated, such as Clemson quarterback Kyle Parker who earned a $1.4 million baseball signing bonus from the Colorado Rockies in 2010 while still playing football for the Tigers. Tennis players may earn up to $10,000 in prize money yearly while playing college tennis and college football players may earn up to $550 in bowl gifts.

B. David Ridpath, EdD, Associate Professor of Sports Administration at Ohio University, noted, "The only amateur quality about college athletics is that colleges refuse to pay their players." Ridpath explained, "The United States is the only country in the world that has a significant portion of elite athletic development and commercialized sport embedded within its education systems. Consider that ten of the biggest outdoor sports stadiums in the world (excluding auto racing venues) are American college football stadiums. None of the largest ones are NFL stadiums."

To fix the problem, and separate athletes who are getting an education just because they want to play a sport from those who actually want to go to college, the United States needs a true amateur or minor league that feeds into professional sports.
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Discussion Questions
1. Should college athletes be paid? Why or why not?

2. Should the college athletics system be revised in another way to compensate amateur athletes? Explain your answer.

3. How should the NCAA (or another governing body) balance college athletes' sport, educational, and financial interests? Explain your answer(s).

4. Do you think well-established minor-league systems would be attractive to high-school graduates and college athletes less interested in (or ill-prepared for) higher education? Explain your answer(s).
Take Action
1. Consider the pro position of the National College Players Association that paying college athletes is a civil rights issue.

2. Explore the NCAA site and think critically about the organization as the governing body of college athletics.

3. Analyze the argument that paying athletes would "ruin college sports" from Cody J. McDavis, former college basketball player.

4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the "other side of the issue" now helps you better argue your position.

5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives.
Sources

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Should College Athletes Be Paid? Top 3 Pros and Cons

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Proponents say colleges profit unfairly off of the athletes. Opponents say the athletes are paid in tuition. Explore both sides of the debate.

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Colorado’s Division II schools are missing out on a recent NCAA settlement to pay student-athletes. Here’s how they plan to stay competitive

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Nine schools in the state compete in Division II. All of them are members of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference.

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Top 20 College Athletes With The Highest NIL Valuations

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Weirdly for some time college athletes making money in college sports regarding Name, Image, and Likeness is a normal thing. Numerous college

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NIL deals disadvantage lower-income athletic programs but shrink wage disparity between professional and collegiate athletics

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On July 1, 2021, the California Senate passed Bill 206 to make California the first state out of 39 to allow college athletes to profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness. As many other states soon followed suit, the bill changed the paths taken by hundreds of thousands of athletes in the United States on…

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Article: Survey shows most people want college athletes to be paid. You hear that, NCAA?

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Article: Survey shows most people want college athletes to be paid. You hear that, NCAA?

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Survey shows most people want college athletes to be paid. You hear that, NCAA?

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It’s difficult for a fair-minded American to look at money flowing into college sports and not see hypocrisy in its reliance on unpaid labor force.

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What is NIL in college sports? How do athlete deals work?

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The NCAA now allows college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, otherwise known as NIL. Learn more about how it works now.

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Article: 16 Reasons College Athletes Should Be Paid (And 5 Against)

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Article: 16 Reasons College Athletes Should Be Paid (And 5 Against)

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College athletes should be paid because they bring a substantial amount of money into their colleges, boost admission rates, put in full-time hours, and do not have the time to get a full-time job on top of their sport.
And yet, ridiculously, in many sports, it's illegal to pay college athletes because it's considered amateur sports.

These are the overarching reasons for which student athletes should be paid. However, there are several more that are justified below.

Reasons Why College Athletes Should be Paid

1. Student athletes bring in money
College sports bring in tremendous amounts of money. Football, basketball, and baseball, in particular, generate billions of dollars a year for colleges in ticket sales, merchandise sales, and advertisements.
Considering the massive revenue generated for colleges because of the student athletes, it only makes sense to pay them for their time, commitment, and energy.

As the system currently operates, it may be argued that college athletes are being exploited. college athletics is the main avenue into professional sports. Thus, the athletes need to go through college athletics even if the pay is low or non-existent. As a result, they feel they have little choice but to put in free labor for the colleges.

Read Also: 42 Colleges with Bear Mascots

2. No time for a part-time job
Not all college athletes have the bank of mom and dad to back them up. Many college athletes are admitted into colleges on scholarships and have little extra money to support themselves.
Living costs such as rent, food, and textbooks add up so many students find part-time employment to cover these costs.

For college athletes, a part-time job really isn't an option. College athletics take up a significant amount of time and are extremely physically and mentally demanding on top of college classes.

Many athletes therefore struggle to make ends meet even though they work day in and day out.

3. Transparency about revenues generated
College sports teams have budgets so there is some degree of knowledge as to where money is coming from and how much of it there is. However, the details are extremely murky, and athletes are often kept in the dark.
As a result, there is no guarantee that the sports teams will see the money they have brought in re-invested in their sport.

In other word, the athletes are bringing money into the colleges that is being redirect - often to inappropriate expenditures.

In fact, there have been several scandals now whereby certain college shareholders have used sports-generated funds inappropriately or even for personal gain.

4. Brings better athletes (higher incentive)
College sports are already incredibly competitive but add the element of payment into the mix, and the bar will raise even higher.
Many star athletes choose not to pursue their sport in college for the simple reason that it isn't paid.

Payment would raise the incentive so the caliber would be even higher than it currently stands.

In fact, if the college athletics system changed, it may increase participation in sports overall meaning the pool of possible stars will grow.

5. Renowned sports teams increase college admissions
College sports do not just bring in revenue. They also attract students, which is another reason the athletes are valuable labor for the college.
There have been many instances of an average college (academically speaking) cultivating a champion sports team and therefore college applications skyrocket.

Further, once a college has a more competitive applicant pool and a renowned reputation, it can raise tuition fees. Thus, college sports can generate money for the school both directly and even indirectly.

6. Athletics are expensive
Playing a sport or doing an athletic activity at a college level usually means the athlete has dedicated a significant portion of their life and personal money to that skill.
In other words, you have to be very good to pursue a sport in college which means you have put in the work to get that good.

Athletics can be expensive and for a student to have practiced to the degree required to make it into college means that they have likely invested a fair amount of money over time.

Students should be paid if they are playing full-time in college as they have invested the resources to be there and should reap the rewards of that investment.

7. College athletes put in the same hours as a full-time job
Considering the hours of practice, games, travel, and physical and mental maintenance, the time commitment can be equal to that of a full-time job.
If someone is putting in the same hours as a full-time job which means they cannot get a job on top of their sport (as explained in point #2) then surely they should be paid for their time commitment.

8. Players bring in merch money
Another point about revenue generation is that merchandisers capitalize not only on teams but on specific players. For instance, if the top college football quarterback wears the number 14 then merchandisers will intentionally produce more merch with this number.
Thus, particular players are generating huge profits and often receive nothing monetary in return.

And it's big money - NCAA merchandise deals are estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are even stories about college athletes freelancing on the side by simply offering to go and do talks or meet-ups with fans who are willing to pay the athletes for their time. But, they're still often unable to profit from the jerseys that have their own names on them!

9. College athletes should have a safety net in case they cannot go pro
Not every college athlete goes on to play in the NBA or the NFL and makes millions of dollars a year.
Those that graduate and do not make it into the professional realm of their sport are left with little to restart their lives on, particularly if their grades have slipped because of their commitment to their sport.

Most college athletes spend their entire childhood and adolescence working on their sport and then graduate college with few other skills. If college athletes were paid, then at least they would have a nest egg to live on while they figure out their next steps.

10. College coaches are paid handsomely
If you consider the situation closely, it seems strange that college sports teams are populated by students who are unpaid but are coached by professionals who are paid extremely well.
Without the athletes, there would be no team for the coach to coach so it seems unfair and frankly, confusing why one key stakeholder would be paid while the others wouldn't.

For the sake of fairness, you would expect the revenues to be more evenly spread around all the people in the team.

11. The sport causes damage to their bodies
Sports like football cause serious damage to athletes' bodies. Many can only play into their early 30s.
As a result, every year of their career is highly valuable and extremely important. While most white-collar jobs enable people to continue working in the profession into your mid-60s, these athletes are going to need to make a lot of their lifetime income in the span of about 10-20 years.

This makes the fact that they're underpaid for several years of their careers even more unfair.

12. They are free media exposure for the schools
College athletics generates a lot of media exposure for schools. In fact, if it weren't for college basketball and football, a lot of schools would never make it onto the television.
And yet, thanks to college athletics, schools have excellent media exposure that often presents them at their best: stadiums of fans wearing the college's colors, cheering on their school.

This media exposure makes the colleges household names and inspires many young people to want to go to those colleges, even from a very young age.

13. It's often an issue of racial justice
A significant number of college footballers and basketballers are young Black Americans. By contrast, the vast majority of the coaches are white.
The visuals of a team of young black athletes being underpaid and unpaid for their labor isn't great for the colleges' attempts at achieving racial justice. This is even more stark when we see how much the white coaches are paid. The coaches, after all, aren't putting their bodies on the line.

14. They are expected to do extracurricular tasks
College athletes do more than training and playing. They often have to turn up for media appearances and college events throughout the year.
This makes the fact that they're unpaid even more egregious. The hours they put into extracurricular and co-curricular activities should be paid - just like a job. For example, if an employee is expected to turn up to an event, they would rightly expect payment for their time.

15. They generate school spirit
Sports is perhaps the number one way schools generate spirit and a sense of community. The college and its supporters come together to cheer on their team.
This school spirit may be considered an intangible benefit to the school, but it has many flow-on benefits. It enhances the college's image, motivates students, and increases the students' satisfaction with their college experience.

A college with a buzz and a positive school spirit can lead to positive word-of-mouth reviews and attract future students.

16. They generate corporate sponsorships
Without college athletes, corporate sponsorships for colleges will never happen. Here is just another way in which they generate money for colleges without compensation.
Corporations sponsor teams that are successful and that have a great image. The sponsorship allows the corporation to generate positive attitudes toward their brand by association with the athletes.

If only a bit of the corporate sponsorship went toward paying the athletes, who often appear in the ads or next to the brand names on t-shirts and posters, then the athletes could have a much better standard of living.

Are there Arguments Against Paying College Athletes?

Some key arguments against paying college athletes are:

They get scholarships: Most college athletes get a full ride scholarship, which is highly valuable and a form of payment for their labor. Nevertheless, they generally don't get any monetary benefits that they can put in the bank for their futures.

They don't have to do it if they don't want: If the athletes didn't see a net benefit out of competing in college athletics, they wouldn't do it. No one is forcing them into it! (Of course, the fact that it's just about the only path to a career as an elite athlete makes it appear to be some degree of coercion).

They get great training: The athletes get access to excellent coaches that they wouldn't have access to otherwise. These coaches are world-class and expensive for the schools to hire. This is a form of non-monetary payment.

It's their chance to get seen: The athletes also get a benefit in the form of visibility to scouts. They get their name out there, get watched performing their sport, and get an opportunity to eventually get a contract that will be extremely lucrative. This is another great non-monetary benefit that the college is providing for the athletes.

They will be paid handsomely afterward: If the athletes get a contract, it would likely be a million-dollar-plus contract that will make up for the lack of pay during their early years at college.

Conclusion

College athletes work extremely hard and arguably, are not far behind their professional counterparts. Furthermore, they bring in a great deal of money and goodwill to the colleges they serve. At the end of the day, they're providing labor to the colleges. So, it makes little sense that they are unpaid.

Related debate topics

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16 Reasons College Athletes should be Paid (And 5 Against) (2023)

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College athletes should be paid because they bring a substantial amount of money into their colleges, boost admission rates, put in full-time hours, and do

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Article: "PD Playlist: Promoting Student Science Talk in the Classroom"

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Article: "PD Playlist: Promoting Student Science Talk in the Classroom"

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PD Playlist: Promoting Student Science Talk in the Classroom

APPROACH: This playlist is designed to support classroom teachers as they equitably incorporate more science talk in their classrooms-as students engage in discourse to make sense of scientific phenomena and engage with science and engineering practices.

Read and discuss the following tools in small groups. Allow additional time to process and explore the second two briefs, as they link off to other useful tools and activities. Taken together, reading all these briefs might lead to a larger discussion and strategy-sharing session around how to support student talk in the science classroom.

Estimated Time: 50 min.
Background: Guiding student science talk in the classroom
Read and discuss these two tools. Reflection questions on each tool can be used to guide your conversation.

Classroom Resources: Activities and tools to generate student science talk

Read and discuss the following two tools, possibly using the reflection questions on each tool. Take a bit more time to explore these tools; each brief links off to many additional resources to be used in the classroom.

Close with a full-group discussion on ideas and action plans you are taking away from this session. As a follow-on learning experience, you should consider exploring another playlist focused on supporting science learning through the argumentation practice.

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PD Playlist: Promoting Student Science Talk in the Classroom : StemTeachingTools (en-US)

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APPROACH: This playlist is designed to support classroom teachers as they equitably incorporate more science talk in their classrooms-as students engage in discourse to make sense of scientific phenomena and engage with science and engineering practices. Read and discuss the following tools in small groups.

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Video: "Discourse Strategies for Inquiry Science: Prompts as Discourse Tools"

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Video: "Discourse Strategies for Inquiry Science: Prompts as Discourse Tools"

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DIT Labs - Fairfax County Public Schools

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Discourse Strategies for Inquiry Science: Prompts as Discourse Tools

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Article: "Discourse Tools Amplify Students' Ideas and Build Knowledge"

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Article: "Discourse Tools Amplify Students' Ideas and Build Knowledge"

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Article: "5 Engaging Discussion Strategies for Grades 6-12" by Edutopia

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Article: "5 Engaging Discussion Strategies for Grades 6-12" by Edutopia

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For teachers seeking to facilitate rather than lead discussions, these strategies empower students to share their ideas.

Sometimes, as teachers, we struggle to help our students connect what they know to what they are learning. When we face this challenge, it can be helpful to examine our practice under a different set of lenses to uncover ways to reinvigorate learning. One of the easiest ways to do this, especially if you're new to the profession, is to take a closer look at how you manage discussions.

When facilitating a discussion, do you direct your students toward specific outcomes, or is there room for them to take ownership of the conversations and make them their own? There are differences, however subtle, between leading and facilitating discussions. The following five strategies, which are particularly suited for middle and high school students, empower student agency and offer a fresh approach to discourse.

CoFounding Environments of Shared Inquiry

When you lead a discussion, you begin with the end in mind-that is, you determine exactly what you want your students to know and guide them with focused questions.

Rather than provide you with a list of strategies that you can use to increase student engagement, our intention is to demonstrate how combininggold standard discussion strategies, such as Turn and Talk or Think-Pair-Share, can energize your teaching practice and produce powerful results.

The following discussion sequences, or dialogic archetypes, can be applied to subjects across the curriculum. They can be disassembled, rearranged, and reconfigured to create new instructional arrangements that appeal to your students' strengths and needs and to your own teaching style.

1. Quick Write, Turn & Talk, Modified Jigsaw, Quick Draw

Here's a sequence that works well when discussing short texts such as case studies: Distribute a number of short texts (three or four should suffice) and blank note cards among your students, so that each student has one text. Ask students to read the texts and respond on the lined side of their note card; you might invite open responses or offer a prompt.

Once students have responded, pair them by text, and ask them to share what they wrote. You might also create discussion groups in which students have read different texts and invite them to explore similarities and differences in themes, characters, conflicts, or other relevant topics, moving from pair to small group work.

Finally, ask students to draw something they learned from their discussion group on the blank side of their note card to share with you, their group mates, or the class as a whole.

2. Four Corners, Think-Pair-Square, Sticky Chat, Gallery Walk

To integrate kinesthetic engagement into classroom discussion, post images related to what you are teaching in the corners of the room, and direct students to stand next to the image that they find most appealing.

Pair students by image, and ask them to conduct some independent research about their chosen picture. If your students do not have ready access to computers, you can provide them with books to explore, or simply ask them to record their thoughts on the images. Create discussion groups of four by combining pairs assigned to the same image. Finally, ask students to write what they learned on sticky notes, and post them on the images. The class might then engage in a gallery walk to learn from one another's findings.

3. Group Roles, Team Pack Discussion, Classroom Mingle, Classroom Poll

For a discussion sequence that connects students with multiple classmates, create groups of three, and provide each group with a different discussion prompt on a note card. Assign each member of the group a role: speaker, scribe, and timekeeper. Ask students to respond to the prompt on their note card before passing it to the next group.

Then, rotate speakers one group to the right and scribes two groups to the right. After the timekeepers have discussed all of the prompts, poll the class for their favorite.

4. Pick a Side, Snowball Discussion, Debate, Graffiti Wall

To lower the stakes and boost participation during classroom debates, ask students to pick a side on a given issue and to write their thoughts on a piece of paper. Direct half of the students to fold their papers lengthwise, the other half widthwise. Collect the papers, assign a side of the issue to each type of fold, and redistribute the papers randomly.

Facilitate debates of two, then four, then eight students, with each side evenly represented. Ask students to record their thoughts on the paper again, and then tape them on the wall to showcase students' engagement.

5. Stoplight Sticky Notes, Affinity Mapping, Gallery Run, Web Discussion

Make learning visible with an archetype that centers the use of maps: Provide students with a prompt connected to a short video or text. Ask them to write their thoughts on color-coded sticky notes: green might mean "interesting," red "challenging." Create small groups, and direct participants to identify similarities and differences between their notes. After small group discussion, arrange the class in a circle, and have them create a "web" by passing a ball of string when they connect with a fellow student's reflection.

Moving Beyond These Discussion Sequences

These instructional sequences can be followed by whole group discussions or some other kind of low-stakes assessment to measure student understanding. However you decide to progress, the point is that strategies that usually stand on their own, or that are simply framed as standing on their own, can be combined to create unforeseen opportunities for engagement. While it is important to have a plan, good teaching is about leaning into the unexpected. It's about taking risks and creating space for your students to actively participate in the meaning-making process.

Even if the archetypes presented here do not appeal to your particular style of teaching, we encourage you to experiment with the strategies that do. It doesn't matter if you've been teaching for three months or 30 years. Education is unmapped terrain, and there will always be something new to discover.

The strategies in this article were developed with Cayla Cosner, an elementary and special education specialist.

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5 Discussion Strategies to Deepen Student Engagement

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There's a difference between leading and facilitating discussions. These strategies de-center the teacher's voice so students' ideas soar.

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Article: "Noted and Notable: Resources for Teachers and Instructional Coaches"

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Article: "Noted and Notable: Resources for Teachers and Instructional Coaches"

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Several links in this article that discuss academic discourse in a classroom, specifically math.

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Resources for Teachers and Instructional Coaches – November 2022 - Edthena

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Read these tips and resources for teachers and instructional coaches for supporting students’ productive struggle and prioritizing teacher self-care.

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Article: "Strategies for the Discourse Guide for Social Studies"

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Article: "Strategies for the Discourse Guide for Social Studies"

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When classroom discussions across the disciplines are rich and student-centered, we are one step closer to equity.

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Article: Opinion | The problem with paying high school athletes

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Article: Opinion | The problem with paying high school athletes

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High school athletes in Iowa can now be paid for their name, image, and likeness.

The Iowa High School Athletics Association and Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union announced on Aug. 17 guidelines for high school athletes to receive compensation for their NIL.

Although athletes can now accept pay for their NIL, the IHSAA and Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union both released a strict set of rules athletes must follow:

"The compensation is not contingent on specific athletic performance or achievement."

"The compensation (or prospective compensation) is not provided as an inducement to attend a particular school ("undue influence") or to remain enrolled at a particular school."

"The compensation is not provided by the school or an agent of the school (e.g., booster club, foundation, etc.)."

The guidelines also prohibits athletes from using IHSAA/Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union or member school logos, apparel or equipment in NIL activity.

While high school student athletes cannot be compensated for their performance or enrollment in a particular program, athletes can earn compensation for selling personal merchandise, appearing in advertisements, and hosting lessons or camps.

These new guidelines are beneficial for athletes who can now be paid for their NIL that they previously could not be compensated for. However, NIL compensation for high-school aged students begs the question: should teenage athletes be a source of profit?

In the media, we have heard countless stories from former child actors and actresses who were abused and taken advantage of by the industry.

In the past month, actress Jennette McCurdy has made headlines with the release of her book, "I'm glad my mom died." In this memoir, McCurdy writes about the abuse she encountered as a child on the popular TV show "iCarly."

This abuse came from inside the home and from prominent figures in the industry. As a result of this abuse, McCurdy struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and anxiety triggered due to the pressure of adults.

But McCurdy's experience is nothing unusual. Many former childhood stars have come forward about the abuse they experienced in the industry by individuals profiting off their childhood.

With all to respect to Iowa high school athletes, I don't anticipate many athletes achieving comparable success to child actors in Hollywood. Hopefully these new guidelines only positively impact athletes whose NIL has gone previously uncompensated.

But this is something we should keep in mind as NIL takes shape in Iowa. Should we really be using the names and images of high school students?

There remains the possibility with these new guidelines that athletes NIL could be abused by those who seek to profit from their popularity. This could result in teenage athletes experiencing burnout, stress, and other mental health issues.

The reality is athletes NIL could be taken advantage, so we should be cautious of how high schoolers NIL are being used. To what extent should a high school athlete become a profitable figure?

With the IHSSA and Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union new guidelines, we should all be mindful of how these teenagers NIL is being used. There are several benefits athletes and their families can gain from these guidelines. But the greed of some may lead to negative implications for said athletes.
Columns reflect the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Editorial Board, The Daily Iowan, or other organizations in which the author may be involved.

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Opinion | The problem with paying high school athletes

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High school athletes in Iowa can now be paid for their name, image, and likeness. The Iowa High School Athletics Association and Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union announced on Aug. 17 guidelines for high school athletes to receive compensation for their NIL. Although athletes can now accept pay for their NIL, the IHSAA and...

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National School Reform Faculty Protocols and Activities

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National School Reform Faculty Protocols and Activities

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School Reform Initiative - A Community of Learners

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We extend our wide range of programs and services. Foundations in Facilitative Leadership and Communities of Practice might feel most familiar. Please connect with us directly, subscribe to our monthly news and follow us to keep up with our community.

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PZ’s Thinking Routines Toolbox | Project Zero

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Teaching and Learning Lab: Discussion Protocols

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Teaching and Learning Lab: Discussion Protocols

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TLL "Discussion Protocols" Tip Sheet.pdf

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Michelle JOnes talks with Sue Kempton about discourse and young learners.

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Supporting Rich Talk for Young Learners - PEBC

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In this episode, Sue Kempton and Michelle Jones discuss the importance of promoting rich talk for young learners. Sue shares how to establish rituals and routines for promoting discourse in a primary...

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Fostering Agency and Undrstanding Through Discourse 

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Fostering Agency and Undrstanding Through Discourse 

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Padlet featuring Jana Durbin talk about discourse with primary students.

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Albert Samaha, Emily Giambalvo, Jesse Dougherty, Artur Galocha

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The hidden NIL economy of college sports

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College athletes are finally getting paid. But how? And how much? A Post analysis of $125 million in payments reveals the patterns and disparities of a murky NIL market.

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Full NCAA president: NCAA should have ‘standard contract' because ‘everybody lies' about NIL

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Graph & Article: What's Going On in This Graph? Paying College Athletes

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Graph & Article: What's Going On in This Graph? Paying College Athletes

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What’s Going On in This Graph? | Paying College Athletes (Published 2022)

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The Shifting Debate Over How College Athletes Should Be Paid | WSJ

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Article: Colorado Governor Signs Bills Allowing NCAA Athletes to Profit Off Name, Likeness

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Article: Colorado Governor Signs Bills Allowing NCAA Athletes to Profit Off Name, Likeness

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Colorado Gov. Signs Bill Allowing NCAA Athletes to Profit Off Name, Likeness

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Colorado became the second state to sign a bill allowing college athletes to be paid for the commercial use of their identities.

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Data Base of Thinking Routines & Other Instructional Strategies

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Data Base of Thinking Routines & Other Instructional Strategies

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Discover Versatile and Effective Instructional Strategies

Every classroom is different, and every student is unique. Our teaching strategies can be easily adapted for your classroom context and are designed to nurture student's individual strengths and learning styles. Whether you want to encourage group participation, help students connect emotionally with a subject, or spark more engagement through classroom activities, you'll find plenty of ideas in our library of proven instructional strategies.
Access our complete teaching strategy collection.

Featured Teaching Strategies

Explore some of our most popular and effective teaching strategies. Many feature classroom-ready handouts that you can print or share on Google Classroom for free.

See All Teaching Strategies

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Use our student-centered teaching strategies to strengthen your students' literacy skills, nurture critical thinking, and build a respectful and collaborative classroom community.

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Introduction

Collaborative learning is a high-leverage practice widely used in schools across grades and subjects. One method involves two students discussing a topic, coming to a consensus, and then sharing with the class. It goes by many names-Turn and Talk, Think Pair Share, Shoulder Partners, Numbered Heads Together, etc. In this TIPS, we show how to remove barriers to allow students with significant cognitive disabilities (SCD) to engage in Turn and Talk activities during instruction in general education classes through the UDL framework . We include examples from an inclusive classroom. The examples presented are reflective of a collaborative process required to plan the use of any strategy, such as Turn and Talk, in inclusive classrooms. To learn more about the process and how to implement it in an inclusive general education classroom, please see the TIES Center 5-15-45 tool.

Evidence

Collaborative learning can be found threaded through several High Leverage Practices (HLP; McLeskey et al., 2017). Cooperative learning promotes self-esteem, creates a safe learning environment, and increases participation opportunities for all students (Jenkins et al., 2003). Check out the HLP Crosswalk TIP sheet for a quick refresher on how HLPs overlap between general and special education.

Through collaborative planning, educators can make the Turn and Talk strategy accessible to all students. This collaboration will require thoughtful consideration to enable all students to participate and benefit, including students with significant cognitive disabilities.

Typically a Turn and Talk process involves three steps:

1. Each student considers the topic or prompt on their own.

2. Each student shares their thoughts with their partner and they come to a consensus.

3. The pair shares their findings with the class (Michaels & O'Connor, 2012).

Turn and Talk is one strategy used to promote academically productive talk in classroom settings. The four main goals of Turn and Talk are to:

1. help individual students share, expand, and clarify their own thoughts;

2. help students listen carefully to one another;

3. help students deepen their reasoning; and

4. help students engage with the reasoning of others (Michaels & O'Connor, 2012).

Research support for using Turn and Talk

Turn and Talks help students apply content to their lives, practice discrete skills, access background knowledge, and answer content related questions (Stewart & Swanson, 2019). Evidence from research shows Turn and Talks help increase students' number of opportunities to respond in content discussions (e.g., MacSuga-Gage & Simonsen, 2015) and the increase in on-task behavior can help students who struggle with inattention (e.g., Locke & Fuchs, 1995). Additionally, the use of Turn and Talk has been known to expand students' expressive communication skills (e.g., Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2013) and improve vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Swanson et al., 2017; Vaughn et al., 2017).

Implementation

Optimize your Turn and Talk by planning opportunities within a lesson prior to being in front of students. Turn and Talks are most effective if a backwards design is used where teachers ask themselves:

if the use of a Turn & Talk will help all students to meet goals of the lesson;

what students should experience and understand by the end of each Turn and Talk.

This backwards design allows teachers to specifically plan how to effectively involve students with significant cognitive disabilities. General education and special education teachers must examine each individual student's expressive and receptive communication skills and level of background knowledge for the topics chosen to determine the best format for engaging every student.

Inclusive Implementation

The UDL framework involves providing multiple means of engagement (the "why" of learning), representation (the "what" of learning), and action & expression (the "how" of learning).

One way to ensure all students have equal access from the use of a Turn & Talk is to use the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL; Meyer et al., 2014) . UDL is a framework to help teachers develop lessons and activities that include all students by addressing engagement, representation, and action and expression. These UDL principles help educators to make the most of varying student strengths and reduced barriers in implementing the Turn & Talk. When students have improved access to content and instructional practices, like the Turn & Talk, they are able to show what they know and become more independent and actively engaged.

Turn and Talk in Action

Below are examples showcasing different general education and special education co-teachers' collaboration to provide Turn and Talk opportunities for all students, including those with a significant cognitive disability. Using a UDL framework, barriers and potential solutions are provided showing where teachers can create access points for these students.

Student 1: Dustin

Dustin is a first grader with multiple disabilities who spends his entire school day in an inclusive classroom with the support of a special educator engaging in some co-teaching. Paraprofessional support is also available to the class, due to Dustin's additional need for support. The teacher is planning to read aloud the book " Ferdinand " and engage the class in discussion as they read using Turn and Talks. Dustin communicates with an Augmentative and Alternative communication device (AAC)-a tablet with different icons that speak aloud when he touches them. Dustin is always listening with a smile on his face, but he doesn't independently share his ideas with the class and tends to look to the paraprofessional when his name is called.

Dustin's general and special education teachers met quickly to discuss his participation in turn and talks in the general education classroom. Here's their conversation:

Conversation transcript

General education teacher: "Dustin is a joy to have in class, but I wonder how can we get him talking with peers and looking at the person asking the question instead of looking at his paraprofessional?"

Special education teacher: "I'd like to see him more independent from his paraprofessional too. I think it would help me help Dustin if we could develop Ferdinand or other story lesson plans ahead of time so that we can go in and pre-program the vocabulary in Dustin's tablet and then I can pre-teach some of the words and definitions to him."

General education teacher: "That's a great idea. I can help pre-teach the vocabulary as well to get Dustin communicating with both of us. This will help several other students in the class too."

See the table below for the process and outcomes Dustin's team used to come up with a plan for his participation in the classroom Turn and Talk.

What are possible barriers?

What are possible solutions?

The special educator will program Dustin's AAC device with a list of words from the general education teacher.

In Dustin's classroom, providing flexible ways to communicate allows all students to share so all forms of communication are valued - whether through text, AAC (such as alternative keyboards), written, visual, or other.

Provide Dustin with a sentence stem or an example of the kind of answer the teachers want.

Provide Dustin with reminders/checklists about how to have productive turn and talk conversations (i.e., group norms for turn and talk) that can be checked off as interactions happen.

Student 2: Sasha

Sasha is a student with autism who has recently been included at her middle school. She had previous experience participating in a general education science class, but due to concerns around her challenging behavior, the team had to pull back and create a new plan to meet her current needs. Sasha is now in a 6th grade earth science class learning about the structure of the earth's layers (i.e., mantle and core). Sasha is good at task completion if she is given hands-on materials at the beginning of lessons. Sasha communicates primarily with speech with visual supports for new concepts. She has a history of humming loudly when not physically engaged with materials. She also tends to swipe materials away from her when someone asks her to do something with them. However, when the purpose of the activity and a model of using the materials is provided, she willingly participates.

Sasha's general and special education teachers met quickly to discuss her participation in Turn and Talks in the general education classroom. Here's their conversation:

Conversation transcript

General education teacher: "I'm nervous about Sasha's swiping the science materials off the table. We need to think carefully about who will be her lab partner."

Special education teacher: "I agree, it's important that we figure out how to teach science lab expectations and find out what keeps Sasha engaged so that she is less inclined to swipe materials. One thing we need to plan for is minimizing the time Sasha is just passively sitting and try to keep the momentum going during the Turn & Talk interactions."

General education teacher: "Hmm..I think a checklist for the lesson will be helpful to Sasha so she understands what we are doing and who she's working with. How about I draft one out and share it with you?"

Special education teacher: "That would be great. I'll also ask Sasha and her parents what we can use to reinforce her engagement and appropriate behavior."

See the table below for the process and outcomes Sasha's team used to come up with a plan for her participation in a Turn and Talk within the science classroom.

What are possible barriers?

What are possible solutions?

The special education teacher customizes the display of information for students. Specifically, Sasha will have individualized prompt cards for following group norms (i.e., turn body in direction of the person talking, yes/no cards telling when it is okay to hum or when it is a quiet time, etc.).

Sasha will be provided with models for the science content vocabulary (i.e. given a model of the Earth showing the layers).

Student 3: Rico

Rico is a student with Down Syndrome in 4th grade who recently started participating in the education classroom for more than just recess and lunch. He knows many of the students in the class well because of their previous interactions. He has not spent academic learning time with his general education peers other than in physical education, art, and music class. Rico's peers like him and are always giving him high-fives and fist bumps. When in the general education classroom, Rico does not answer questions in the whole group and will often just repeat the question. Rico's speech is also hard to understand, but he does not use any assistive technology to support his communication.

Rico's general and special education teachers met quickly to discuss his participation in Turn and Talks in the general education classroom. Here's their conversation:

Conversation transcript

Special education teacher: "You know, Rico is very capable socially and I know he can do the work academically. I don't want to see him get away with not responding to the Turn & Talk prompts. What do you think?"

General education teacher: "I love having Rico in the classroom, but I am unsure how to get him to participate. I really would like to see him respond without someone telling him what to say."

Special education teacher: ​"I think we need to work with his peers so that they also hold high-expectations for him. Let's think through how we can help both Rico and his peers during the Turn and Talk."

See the table below for the process and outcomes Rico's team used to come up with a plan for his participation in the classroom Turn and Talk.

What are possible barriers?

What are possible solutions?

The special education and general education teachers will train multiple peers on how to provide social and communication supports (i.e., showing response materials and prompting) during the Turn and Talk.

The general education teacher will pair Rico with a trained peer who will provide wait time and not answer for Rico. The peer will encourage Rico after he makes a response that is not repeating the question.

The special education teacher will make sentence starter strips and response cards for the peer to use with Rico during Turn & Talk.

The teachers and peers model how to use virtual or concrete manipulatives for mathematics (and not as toys).

The teacher designs multiple tools for all students to aid in their construction and composition of responses.

The general education teacher and special education teacher plan Turn and Talk prompts before class to create pre-made sentence strips with appropriate response choices.

Below is an example of a self-monitoring checklist to use as a peer communication support (Figure 1). This may not be necessary for all students. From the examples above, Dustin may not need a checklist like this; however, it could help Sasha monitor her own progress in back and forth interactions with a peer. It could also help Rico's partner provide appropriate support, as needed, during the Turn and Talk interaction.

Figure 1. Turn and Talk Self-monitoring Checklist/Peer Communication Support

Illustrated guide of task analysis for turn and talk from Project IMPACT. The image includes 6 rows showing the steps for turn and talk with symbols that can be checked off as a student progress through the steps:

1. listen to question;

2. answer a question;

3. read paragraph, read sentence, touch answer;

4. ask question;

5. listen to answer, [repeat steps 1-5 or]

6. agree/disagree.

Summary

For students with significant cognitive disabilities, contributions in collaborative learning like Turn and Talks require thoughtful planning by general education and special education teachers and staff. When teams work together to create access points for these students, authentic participation is possible.

Further

TIPS Series: Tip #15, November 2020

The information in this Brief is not an endorsement of any identified products. Products identified in this Brief are shared solely as examples to help communicate information about ways to reach the desired goals for students.

All rights reserved. Any or all portions of this document may be reproduced without prior permission, provided the source is cited as:

Reyes, E. N., Wakeman, S., & Clausen, A. (2020). Turn and Talk (TIPS Series: Tip #15). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, TIES Center.

TIES Center is the national technical assistance center on inclusive practices and policies. Its purpose is to create sustainable changes in kindergarten-grade 8 school and district educational systems so that students with significant cognitive disabilities can fully engage in the same instructional and non-instructional activities as their general education peers, while being instructed in a way that meets individual learning needs. TIES Center is led by the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) at the Institute on Community Integration, University of Minnesota, and includes the following additional collaborating partners: Arizona Department of Education, CAST, University of Cincinnati, University of Kentucky, University of North Carolina - Charlotte, and University of North Carolina - Greensboro.

TIES Center is supported through a Cooperative Agreement (#H326Y170004) with the Research to Practice Division, Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Education or Offices within it. Project Officer: Susan Weigert

TIES Center

University of Minnesota

Institute on Community Integration

2025 East River Parkway

Minneapolis, MN 55414

Phone: 612-626-1530
www.tiescenter.org
This document is available in alternate formats upon request.

The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity employer and educator.

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TIES TIPS | Foundations of Inclusion | TIP #15: Turn and Talk in the Inclusive Classroom

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Collaborative learning is a high-leverage practice widely used in schools across grades and subjects. One method involves two students discussing a topic, coming to a consensus, and then sharing with the class. It goes by many names-Turn and Talk, Think Pair Share, Shoulder Partners, Numbered Heads Together, etc.

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A Socratic Seminar invites students to facilitate a discussion in order to work together toward a shared understanding of a text.

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See, Think, Wonder Ver, Pensar, Preguntarse Vejo, Penso, Pergunto ou Imagino

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Discourse in Mathematics

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Photo credit: Laura Zimmerman

Sammamish High School has defined seven key elements of problem-based learning used in our classrooms. This week we will explore the key element of academic discourse. How students communicate their discoveries and connect them to the overall learning is an essential part of what we do. Without proper communication, progress cannot be made on many projects.

What is Academic Discourse?

Academic discourse encompasses the idea of dialogue, the language used, and a format that facilitates a high level of communication in the classroom. The discourse can range from peer-to-peer discussion to whole-class discussion and can take on many forms: metacognition, presentations, debate, listening, writing, and critiquing others' work. What is important is that students are able to process and interact using academic vocabulary.

Academic discourse is not something that comes easily to most students; rather, it is something that needs to be taught, modeled and recognized by both teachers and students. With strategic instruction around what academic discourse sounds, looks and feels like, it can be a useful tool that enriches all classroom interactions and facilitates deeper learning and retention. As we developed the key elements of our program, the math department reflected on how academic discourse could become stronger in our classrooms.

1. We set the expectation that students will present problems and explain how they reached their answer.

2. We emphasized the importance of using correct vocabulary. For example, math students often confuse an expression and an equation. Making that distinction is important for students. To retain the difference between the two words, they must practice using those words.

3. We made writing in math a norm. Students will be expected to write about the process of how they reached an answer. This serves as another way of seeing how students are processing the material and how they are applying vocabulary words.

We defined the most important components of academic discourse within a math classroom and developed an approach to implementing these components.

Processing the Problem

Through our problem-based learning curriculum, the complexity of problems forces students to communicate with each other more than if they were just working on individual homework. In our unit called "How can the student store maximize their profit?", students work in groups to study a product and how sales would change based on a price increase or decrease. They look at the cost of that product and, based on the data, create a quadratic equation to determine profit. This quadratic tells them at what price change the student store can maximize its profit for that specific product. Students are completing this project while learning about quadratics, so it presents many difficulties. For example, students need to process what each axis represents, and how income, profit and cost are related in this context, identifying break-even points and the vertex.

When presented with a PBL task that is especially difficult, students need one another to process their thinking, providing a natural way for them to become more comfortable with academic discourse. At the end of this unit, students were asked to individually write a letter to the student store recommending a price change. This was a way to assess their use of vocabulary and how their interactions contributed to their understanding of the material. It is also important for students to self-assess their understanding of the material. Processing techniques might include starting the period with vocabulary games, or having students reread their writing and underline the vocabulary words they used.

After completing a unit where students are dependent on communicating with group members, academic discourse is elevated in the classroom. Students cross the threshold of being nervous as they begin talking to their peers about their learning. Prior to implementing our problem-based learning curriculum, most student discourse consisted of students comparing answers. With practice, students find that discourse helps deepen their processing and validates their contributions to the group. As a teacher, modeling academic discourse is essential, but acknowledging students for their academic discourse is what makes it stick in the classroom.
Editor's Note: Visit "Case Study: Reinventing a Public High School with Problem-Based Learning" to stay updated on Edutopia's coverage of Sammamish High School.
Over the past year, we have established that increasing academic discourse also increases classroom engagement. When students are more likely to interact with their peers and take part in discussions, the long-term benefits of their understanding of the material are apparent in other math courses.

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Photo credit: Laura Zimmerman Sammamish High School has defined seven key elements of problem-based learning used in our classrooms. This week we will explore the key element of academic discourse. How students communicate their discoveries and connect them to the overall learning is an essential part of what we do.

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Steven English demonstrates the importance of developing a community of learners.

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Students in Steven English’s 8th grade science class build their understanding of variables in an experiment by engaging in small group and whole class discussions. The teacher facilitates student-centered discussion through questioning and the use of a koosh ball technique.

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Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation

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Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation

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New York Times

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Fistfights at campaign rallies. A congressional sit-in. Angry political trolling on the internet. It's not your imagination: America's partisan divide is deeper today than at any point in nearly a quarter-century, according to a new study.

So begins an article from June 2016, which described a problem that has only deepened as the weeks of this unprecedented, vitriolic presidential campaign have gone on.

Months ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented the worrying effects of all this angry rhetoric on students and classrooms, and, since then, we've heard those concerns echoed by teachers we asked ourselves. But even after this election is over, a divided nation will remain - and teachers will always be in a uniquely powerful position to help young people learn how to talk to each other across those divides.

Below, we share some ideas we've collected from our readers, The Times and around the web. Use them anytime you and your students are tackling controversial issues, whether in a traditional classroom or online. We welcome your additions to the list.
Updated: Jan., 2017: In the fall of 2016, as a companion to this lesson, we invited students to participate in what we called our Civil Conversation Challenge.

From early October until Nov. 7, teenagers from around the world were encouraged to weigh in on some of the most divisive issues of the 2016 election. The challenge, however, was for them to have the kinds of respectful, productive discussions across ideological divides that, it seemed, many adults were unable to. In December, we wrote about the nearly 3,000 comments we received on the issues of Take a look at our _________ 1. Create classroom rules and structures that support respectful and generative discussion, online and off. Ideas for Productive Discussion: Reflections on Our Civil Conversation Challenge to read our observations about the best of those conversations and what made them work, along with unedited student examples for each. immigration, , climate and energy, and race, gender and identity, as well as on many other topics suggested by students themselves in our .

How do you handle conversations in your classroom in general? What structures and rules are in place to ensure that they are constructive and civil, yet promote real learning and growth? How do you invite all voices? What happens when someone states an unpopular opinion?

Consider talking about these issues with your students after first asking them to write anonymously about how teachers and schools in general might improve in this area. What problems do they see? What memorable experiences, good and bad, have informed their attitudes toward class discussions? What suggestions for rules, structures or guidelines might they have? How should schools balance the need for open intellectual discussion about issues with the need to protect those who may feel marginalized for some reason?

Then, have a classroom discussion about classroom discussions.

Over the years, we have published many ideas for talking about sensitive issues, and suggested structures including journal-writing, the " one-question interview," fishbowls and four-corner exercises. You might use any of those methods, or consult this " big list of class discussion strategies" from Cult of Pedagogy. Or, use a protocol called Circle of Viewpoints that focuses on helping students consider diverse perspectives on a topic.

Finally, extend your inquiry from physical classroom conversation to online discussion by borrowing a recent Reader Idea from a teacher named Kate Harris.

She explains how, when teaching a high school World Religions elective, she used the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as a "teachable moment" to help her students observe and critique online conversations. Ms. Harris writes:

Teachers have to address the political and social issues that divide our nation and dominate our social media feeds. More important, we need to equip students to address those issues on their own, to engage with and respond to conversations and news that may be troubling or challenging, from domestic gun control and police brutality to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and worldwide terrorism. So much of our students' worlds is online. How can we get them to think critically not only about big media, delivered by giants such as Fox News and The New York Times, but also about "little media," or the comments and tweets that they write, read and repost?

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2. Take the 'Speak Up for Civility' pledge from Teaching Tolerance.

Though it is a pledge intended for teachers and other adults, you might share it with your students as well:

I pledge to discuss this election with civility, to treat people whose opinions differ from mine with respect, and to focus on ideas, policies and values. I will encourage others to do the same. I will speak up when I hear name-calling, stereotypes and slurs. I will do this because children are listening, and it's important that adults model good citizenship.

The organization's ideas for teaching Election 2016 can also be useful, and those under the heading of "getting along" can be applied far beyond this election season.

_________
3. Read and discuss articles that explore the problem of a divided America.

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4. Consider commenting standards - and test what you learn via the Times Comment-Moderation Quiz.

In " What Your Online Comments Say About You," Anna North writes about some questions researchers recently asked:

When we comment on news stories, most of us hope to say something about the topic at hand - even (or maybe especially) if it's that the author got it all wrong. But what do the comments we leave say about us - about our beliefs, our biases and how we act when the ordinary rules don't apply? And how do our comments affect the beliefs of others?

Read that article, and, for more context, perhaps the Room for Debate forum " Have Comment Sections on News Media Websites Failed?" Why do we seem to be able to say things online that we wouldn't say in person? Where do students see especially glaring examples of that?

The Times, including The Learning Network, has commenting standards put in place to maintain civility. You might share them with students, along with a related Times post, " The Top 10 Reasons We Deleted Your Comment." What do they think of these rules? Could they be useful elsewhere on the internet? Why or why not?

Then, test how well they have absorbed those standards by taking a Times quiz created by ourcomment-moderation team. If you were a moderator, which responses would you approve and which would you reject? Why?

Finally, have students choose a Times article that interests them and that has many reader comments. Scan the comments, noticing which ones are "reader picks" and which are "Times picks." What do they notice about the conversation? Is it generally civil? Do they think people are actually talking to each other, or do you think they are more talking at each other? In their opinion, can online conversations ever change minds?

You might start with a recent Op-Ed essay " Will the Left Survive Millennials?" Among the many comments, this one by Andy B:

Has anyone noticed that despite our increasing diversity, we are becoming a more isolated society? More prone to stare at a screen than to engage our neighbors in conversation. That same screen provides easy access to surround oneself with an echo chamber that allows for an ever growing sense of entitlement to impose one's opinion on others above all else. Both sides have moved so far away from one another that honest constructive debate is next to impossible. For the sake of our American experience, let's hope we can eventually find a unifying force. Imagine what could be done as a society if we unplugged and engaged again.

_________
5. Practice empathy.

Do your students know who Glenn Beck is? He is a conservative radio host and media personality who surprised many this summer when he urged his fellow conservatives to understand the Black Lives Matter movement. He then published an Op-Ed essay in The Times that begins:

In a recent speech to a group of conservatives, I made what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial point about the commonalities between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter activists. I thought this was a simple idea, but the criticism was immediate and sharp: How dare I try to understand the "other side"?

But as people, wouldn't we all benefit from trying to empathize with people we disagree with?

Have them read what he has to say - and read some of the 919 comments Times readers made in response. What do they think of the argument he makes? What issues about which they feel passionately might they seek to understand from an opposing point of view?

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6. Back up statements with evidence and sources.

"These days it seems like politics and propaganda take precedence over rational discussion, especially when the conversation goes online, " writes Chris Sloan in an essay at KQED Education on " Teaching the Art of Civil Dialogue. He suggests "teaching argument the way it's been conceived since Aristotle's time."

It seems that everyone agrees that in order to be "college and career ready" our students need to know how to write argument and back it up with evidence. In reality, this approach falls short when our own assumptions are challenged; however, research shows that learning gains are greatest in these moments of "cognitive dissonance."

The winners of our annual Student Editorial Contest, in which we invite students to "write about an issue that matters to you" but back it up with evidence both from The Times and elsewhere, can provide models for how to do this. You might invite students to scroll through the essays and find a few that interest them to see how the evidence is woven in.

And this related lesson plan can help with tips and ideas. In it, we quote Andrew Rosenthal, former Times editorial page editor, who made a video for our contest and reminds students to do their research. He says:

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, you're not entitled to your own facts. Go online, make calls if you can, check your information, double-check it. There's nothing that will undermine your argument faster than a fact you got wrong, that you did not have to get wrong.

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7. Listen better, and ask genuine questions that seek to help you understand rather than judge.

Hearing is easy, writes Seth S. Horowitz in the Sunday Review. But "listening is a skill that we're in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload."

Many teachers are familiar with the concept of " active listening" and, via activities like "think/pair/share," have incorporated regular practice in the skill. But listening can be much more, as this famous essay from the 1930s, " Tell Me More," describes. In it, the writer Brenda Ueland says listening is a "creative force," and explains:

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it.

One recent example of listening in action: a new book by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild that seeks to understand " Why Do People Who Need Help From the Government Hate It So Much? " The Times reviewer writes, "A distinguished Berkeley sociologist, Hochschild is a woman of the left, but her mission is empathy, not polemics." Have students read the review to understand the role open-minded questioning and listening played in this "respectful" work, then think about how they might practice listening to those with whom they disagree.

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8. Expand your 'filter bubble.'

In a Student Opinion question, " Is Your Online World Just a 'Filter Bubble' of People With the Same Opinions?," we challenge teenagers to look at their social and news feeds and work to broaden them to include new perspectives and opinions.

Read our questions and invite your students to think about where and how they get their news. How diverse are their social media and news feeds in terms of the ages, races, religions, geographical locations, interests and political affiliations of the people they follow - and why does it matter?

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9. Consider why 'us and them' is so ingrained in who we are.

Our friends at Facing History and Ourselves frequently look at questions like these:

* Why are notions of "us and them" such a consistent feature of human societies?

* When and why does an "us and them" view of the world become especially appealing or attractive? When does this worldview develop into verbal and physical violence?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for information that supports the way we feel about something. Carl Richards wrote about it for The Times in a 2013 piece, " Challenge What You Think You Know ":

We do this all the time. In fact, academics even have a name for it: confirmation bias. It's when we form an opinion, and then we systematically look for evidence to support that opinion while discarding anything that contradicts it.

The first place we go for feedback about what we believe is other people. And who do we ask first? That's right, people we know who are already inclined to think the same way as we do. And friends don't always tell one another the truth, even if they disagree. The result is a dangerous feedback loop that actually confirms our bias. It's incredibly hard to avoid.

The Upshot also wrote about this phenomenon, saying:

...confirmation bias may be the reason that our political debates remain intractable. After all, as you accumulate more evidence confirming your views, you're less likely to question them, and less likely to change your mind. As members of competing political tribes collect more evidence in favor of their favored views, their opinions harden, and each tribe becomes more convinced of its correctness.

So what's the solution? As Mr. Richards writes, "The only solution that I see is to purposely expose yourself to views that don't match yours." In an echo of many of the other ideas in this post, he suggests purposely seeking out views from "the other side," whether via websites, books, radio or television, or conversations with people across the aisle. And, he says, it's not enough just to seek them out:

Try, just try, to listen, to understand. See if you can get to the point where you can honestly say, "I understand the argument and can see why they feel that way."

_________

How do you foster civil conversation in your classroom? Tell us in the comments.

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Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation On Difficult Issues

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Fistfights at campaign rallies. A congressional sit-in. Angry political trolling on the internet. It's not your imagination: America's partisan divide is deeper today than at any point in nearly a quarter-century, according to a new study. So begins an article from June 2016, which described a problem that has only deepened as the weeks of this unprecedented, vitriolic presidential campaign have gone on.

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Whole class discussions are, after lecture, the second most frequently used teaching strategy, one mandated by the Common Core State Standards because of its many rewards: increased perspective-taking, understanding, empathy, and higher-order thinking, among others. These benefits, however, do not manifest without a skillful and knowledgeable facilitator.

Unfortunately, a preponderance of evidence demonstrates that many teachers mistakenly conflate discussion with recitation. "Typical teacher-student discourse resembles a quiz show, with teachers asking a question, the student replying, and the teacher evaluating the student's response. This is called initiation-response-evaluation, 'I-R-E,' or recitation." ¹

In contrast to recitation, quality discussion, according to the University of Washington's Center for Instructional Development and Research, involves purposeful questions prepared in advance, assessment, and starting points for further conversations. Teachers are also advised to:

Distribute opportunities to talk

Allow discussants to physically see each other

Ask questions that "may or may not have a known or even a single correct answer"²

Foster learners talking to peers³

Encourage students to justify their responses

Vary the types of questions

The Problem with Question Taxonomies

Many instructors reference question taxonomies while planning, such as Barbara Gross Davis' inventory, the Socratic Questions, or the question set recommended by Stephen Brookfield:

Epistemological: Why does the author believe that ___?

Experiential: What have you encountered that makes you think that ___?

Communicative: How does the author rhetorically convey her theme?

Political: What groups would take issue with the implicit message that ___?

Developing questions that align with the ubiquitously misused New Bloom's Taxonomy -- starting a discussion with recall questions and stair-stepping through the rest until higher order prompts are dispatched -- has been sold as a pathway to cognitive vigor. Observe how many classrooms have Bloom's Taxonomy posted on the back wall for the teacher to reference. Over-reliance on question hierarchies can result in conversations that are irrelevant to the content and context of the learning environment, and invite answers that nobody cares about.

Claims by commercial texts often employ jargon to defend discussion routines that are unsupported by research, with the exception of studies commissioned by companies selling curriculum materials and tests. Covering all of the question types at the end of a basal reading does not ensure cognitive gains. Also in dispute is the entrenched belief that asking higher-order questions leads to higher levels of thinking (see reviews of meta-studies here and here).

With well over 30 question classification systems, how do you choose those that hold the most promise? According to sociolinguists, the answer depends on the context in which they are used. ⁴

Rather than habitually adhering to any of the hierarchical question sets during class dialogues (a non-hierarchical approach, Christenbury and Kelly's Questioning Circles offer strategies for crafting "dense" prompts that integrate the subject, world and reader), I suggest that instructors direct their attention to modeling inquiry, emphasizing divergent over convergent questions, organizing students' approach to question-asking and -answering, listening, and providing authentic follow-up questions. Because of the complexity of these practices, robots will not replace teachers anytime soon.

The Mechanics of In-Class Discussion

Follow-Up Questions

Ian Wilkinson defines authentic follow-up as "questions that the teacher is genuinely interested in exploring and that evoke a variety of responses from students (in other words, the answer is not pre-specified)." Good follow-up questions expand the conversation and require students to:

Clarify their answers: Tell me more about that.

Support their answers: What about the reading made you think that ___?

Argue: Convince us that __.

Examine their responses more fully: In what other context does that idea play out?

Consider different perspectives: What would you say to someone who thought ___?

Predict: What do you think that we will discover in the next chapter?

Hypothesize: How would handle a situation like ___?

Decide: So, this leads to you to what conclusions?

Compare: How is your answer different or the same from others?

Generalize: What did you discover?

Avoid the Following

Trick questions

Inadequate wait time (less than 3-5 seconds)

Lectures disguised as questions

Sarcasm

Questions with obvious answers

Asking multiple questions before allowing response

Rhetorical questions

Yes or no questions

Set Parameters

Many learners need to be taught how to engage in an academic dialogue -- particularly ELL/ESL students. Provide conversation stems on a poster board or notecards:

"Could you tell me more about why ___?"

"Let me explain why I see that differently."

"Have you considered ___?"

"What we both agree on is ___."

A Handy Playbook

Lastly, I've provided a general checklist of items to consider when planning a discussion:

Room layout (ensure discussants can see each other)

Clarify objectives, purpose, relevance and ground rules

Front-load rehearsal activities:

Engage students with the first question

Vary the whole class format:

Conduct formative assessment with these questions:

1. What conclusions have we drawn so far?

2. What part of our discussion is the most confusing?

3. What questions should we focus on next?

1. True or false? Teachers lecture more than they use questioning.

2. True or false? Asking questions more frequently leads to higher levels of thinking.

3. The ideal wait time after asking a question is how many seconds?

4. Teachers spend how much of class time talking?

5. Do groups larger than three, five or seven discourage students from participating?

6. Girls talk less frequently when academic conversations are perceived as what?

1. True (Wilen, 1991)

2. False. Asking questions does, however, improve factual knowledge. (Good & Brophy, 2000)

3. 3-5 seconds (Rowe, 1974; Tobin, 1986)

4. 75% (Dillon, 1988; Hunkins, 1995; Brice & Johnson, 1995)

5. 7 (Cohen, 1994)

6. Too lengthy (Larson & Kieper, 2013)

Plan for exigencies

Plan how you will end the conversation

Assess the conversation with these discussant rubrics:

¹(2007). Teacherknowledge - Discussion - Recitation - Lecture. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://teacherknowledge.wikispaces.com/Discussion+-+Recitation+-+Lecture.
²(2012). A Literate Community: Common Threads and Unique ... - Google Play. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=OVkdHr8FGw0C&rdid=book-OVkdHr8FGw0C&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read.
³Facilitating Effective Classroom Discussions. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/discussion.htm.
⁴Cazden, C. (2001). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Rethinking Whole Class Discussion | Edutopia

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Whole class discussions are, after lecture, the second most frequently used teaching strategy, one mandated by the Common Core State Standards because of its many rewards: increased perspective-taking, understanding, empathy, and higher-order thinking, among others. These benefits, however, do not manifest without a skillful and knowledgeable facilitator.

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It's a teacher's nightmare: opening discussion to a completely silent classroom. But when done well, class discussions are an excellent way for students to work through problems, identify gaps in understanding or content, and facilitate deeper insight and learning.

Class discussions get a boost from free technology

One benefit of technology is the abundance of free, easily-accessed resources that can help spur classroom discussions. With many schools having incorporated smartboards and computers into the classroom, teachers can explore ways to enhance student learning with these features.

At the same time, it is important to ensure that technology is a learning benefit rather than an inhibitor. Because student access to and agility with these resources is at an all-time high, incorporating them into educational life can spark high levels of engagement during discussion.

Class hashtags: How Twitter can inspire classroom discussion

One free resource that can be helpful in any content area is Twitter, the social media network that specializes in sharing updates of 140 characters or less. A single class-based Twitter account allows students to communicate what they are doing with the outside world by interacting with specialists, reporting about a field trip they're on, or taking notes on classroom content.

Students can also tweet questions under a unique class hashtag, which can then be projected on a wall using programs like Twijector and Tweetchat. This can act as an instructor backdrop and during lulls in discussions, students can refer to other student questions, mention their own, or find inspiration from what they see before them.

Using additional hashtags, students can practice skills such as finding a thesis, succinctly summarizing a reading, or reporting various concerns or questions they have over reading material. These projected hashtag searches are also a great way for students to get real-time information about unfolding events.

Rotating responsibility for the class Twitter account and projecting tweets gives the class an opportunity to highlight missing pieces, discuss what they've shared, or even remember something they may have forgotten.

Using Storify to compile information for discussion

When it comes to accessing information in future class discussions, Twitter's timeliness is also its downfall - at some point, there's too much data to process. However, that's when another social network, Storify, comes in handy. Storify can be used to collect user-generated stories through sources including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Teachers can compile news articles, student tweets, other online resources, and perhaps even an instructor video into a single Storify document. Students can then have access to this document at any time.

Creating student-generated discussions with Padlet

A final way to encourage student discussion is to create a discussion-related Padlet. Padlet is an online corkboard where students, when given a link to the hidden or password-protected URL, can post questions, images, documents, or video links.

To facilitate discussions, students could be required to submit a question to the class padlet before class. When students are together, the Padlet can be projected so the class, as a whole or in smaller groups, can discuss and answer each question. Instructors or other students can pin additional questions or responses on the Padlet so that students have an easy visual of their collaborative learning.

Classroom social media, FERPA and digital literacy

All three of these resources can enhance and facilitate classroom discussions with some forethought and routine use, but it is worth noting that every educator is responsible for ensuring student privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Protections Act (FERPA). FERPA is a broad umbrella of protections that reinforce students' privacy rights while in school. Padlet's ability to password-protect individual walls enhances student protections, but it is a generally good idea to have students choose nicknames, gamertags or non-name designated logins for Twitter and Storify in order to protect their own privacy.

Discussions about digital literacy and and how to create and maintain respectful online profiles is essential for these students. Rather than avoiding social media altogether, it is beneficial to have an open discussion about how to use these resources wisely. With Twitter, Storify, or a Padlet available to all, classroom time that was once wasted in silence as students struggled to find something to talk about can now be spent in deep discussions inspired by student-generated questions and ideas.
Monica Fuglei is a graduate of the University of Nebraska in Omaha and a current faculty member of Arapahoe Community College in Colorado, where she teaches composition and creative writing.
Learn More: Click to view related resources. Tags: Engaging Activities, Language Arts, Social Media

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Using Social Media to Inspire Classroom Discussions

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It's a teacher's nightmare: opening discussion to a completely silent classroom. But when done well, class discussions are an excellent way for students to work through problems, identify gaps in understanding or content, and facilitate deeper insight and learning. One benefit of technology is the abundance of free, easily-accessed resources that can help spur classroom discussions.

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AMLE - Association for Middle Level Education

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You ask the students, "What is the main idea of the passage?"

Joseph responds, "Always persevere," to which you reply, "Very good, Joseph."

In the average classroom, as much as 70% of instructional time consists of these kinds of verbal exchanges between you and students or among students: teacher initiation, student response, teacher evaluation of the response/feedback. Classroom discussion, dialogue, and discourse are the principal means of exchanging ideas, evaluating mastery, developing thinking processes, and reflecting on content and shared thoughts.

Engaging students in effective classroom talk begins by creating a discourse-rich classroom culture. Begin the year by discussing what rich discourse is, the rationale for it, and answering the What's In It for Me question by specifying ways students benefit.

Another key element of building a discourse-rich culture is embedding the spirit of collaboration versus competition. Classroom talk is not only a means of students supporting each other, but also of holding each other accountable by helping clarify, restate, and challenge ideas.

Students may not participate if their thoughts are ridiculed, devalued, or ignored. To that end, establishing norms of discourse helps develop safe spaces, establishes boundaries, and moves the discussion forward.

In my classroom, the norms included specifics on how to engage in active listening, address ideas versus individuals, and respectfully disagree/question. Role-playing appropriate and inappropriate actions can give students a better understanding of their expected role during classroom talk.

A third central element of developing a culture that fosters rich discourse is helping students appreciate the processes to get there versus simply the production of right answers. Make it clear that you value students strategically thinking about, discussing, clarifying, and elaborating on ideas rather than having someone simply state the correct answer in order to save time.

Complex Thinking Processes

Does most of your classroom talk consist of students recalling or reproducing facts? Or, do they often use complex thinking strategies such as making claims supported with evidence and reasoning, discerning the author's purpose and its effect on the interpretation of text, and applying models to tasks? As you begin to reshape and enrich your classroom discourse, planning for and assessing complex thinking processes is essential.

To begin to engage students in more complex thinking processes, be clear about the distinction between difficult and complex. I ask teachers in my professional learning sessions whether the task of spelling a word such as antidisestablishmentarianism is difficult or complex. Many say it's complex. However, if students have a good grasp of phonemic awareness (sounds that build words), spelling long words may be difficult, but not complex.

Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) model (recall, skill/concept, strategic thinking, extended thinking) can be used to plan and assess the complexity of thinking as well as the presence of rigor. This tool may help you plan for the type of discourse that evokes deeper cognitive processes. You might use it to:

Prompt students to describe and analyze the characteristics of texts written during the modernism period.

Identify and explain misconceptions around the discovery of America.

Justify solutions for mathematical tasks involving equations with more than one solution.

Cite evidence and use reasoning to support the claim that an unknown liquid is a mixture.

Webb's DOK is a powerful tool that can help you evoke complex thinking processes during discourse. You'll find a comprehensive graphic at http://static.pdesas.org/content/documents/M1-Slide_19_DOK_Wheel_Slide.pdf

Engage Reluctant Students

You probably have a few students who need their mouths physically pried open before they will contribute. Some are fearful of being critiqued in the courtroom of classmate opinion and find solace in silence. Others are disinterested and prefer to think about everything else except what's going on in your room. Here are a few suggestions for bringing such reticent students into the fold of rich discourse:

Invite them to discuss a topic that is important to them. Interest inventories, heart maps, and informal conversation can help you uncover such topics.

Engage them in partner talk (e.g., pair-share, turn-and-talk) or small group before whole group. More students participate in whole-group talk if first allowed to articulate, clarify, and reorganize thoughts with a partner.

Appreciate wait-time. When you want to know how to repair that leaky faucet in your kitchen or where your favorite retailer is located, you want the best answer in the shortest amount of time. Similarly, in the classroom, you may be guilty of wanting the best answer in the shortest time, given the pressure of staying on target with the pacing guide. Hardly novel but wholly effective, wait-time has been shown to improve not only the proportion of students who respond but the quality of the responses as well.

Name the strategy after a student. For instance, when a student provides a substantive contribution, call it the Johnathan way, Maureen method, or Sharon technique.

Releasing the instructional reins to your students can make you uneasy. Fear of letting go may conjure thoughts of less learning taking place, increasing disorder, and the discomfort of not driving the wheels of learning. However, when students lead discourse, they clarify their own ideas and increase their levels of cognitive and behavioral engagement. It makes their thinking visible and helps you determine the most effective subsequent instructional moves.

To introduce student-led discourse, explicitly model the talk. Have them lead discourse about a topic many are passionate about, such as social media rights for young people, as a way to get them more comfortable and familiar with leading discourse.

Figure 1
Moving from Conventional Discourse to Rich Discourse

Conventional Classroom Discourse Rich Classroom Discourse

Convergent responses

Divergent responses

Known answer questions atypically posed

Multiple answers/explanations possible

Predominantly teacher-driven and led

Students co-construct, drive, and often lead discourse

Students rarely afforded latitude to build on peers' thoughts

Students build on, challenge, revoice, and share ideas with peers

Teacher relies on a few students to carry talk

Many students eagerly participate

Aim is to have correct answer given in shortest time

Goal is to have students articulate strategic thinking

Self-Checking Discourse Quality

A few questions may help you self-assess the quality of discourse in your class:

Is the emphasis on giving the right answers rather than processes and strategies?

Do the verbal interactions follow the teacher-dominated initiation-response-evaluation pattern?

Is discourse carried by the voices of a few where the others are reluctant to contribute?

Do you often provide opportunities for students to lead the discourse?

Do you model and insist wait-time be used as a key component of dialogue?

Do you send non-verbal signals to students based on your perception of their ability to give a quick or correct response?

Does your lack of comfort with content lead you to pose more close-ended questions?

When you create a classroom culture rife with intellectually safe spaces and emphases on processes of strategic thinking versus production of right answers, you invite instructional episodes of rich discourse. Student-led discourse is a powerful way to let students take ownership of their own learning.

Jelani Jabari is president of Pedagogical Solutions, LLC, in Detroit, Michigan. jabari@pdlsolutions.com

Published in AMLE Magazine, November 2014.

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You ask the students, “What is the main idea of the passage?” Joseph responds, “Always persevere,” to which you reply, “Very good, Joseph.” In the average classroom, as much as 70% of instructional time consists of these kinds of verbal exchanges between you and students or among students: teacher initiation, student response, teacher evaluation of the response/feedback.

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Douglas Fisher is a Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education at San Diego State University (SDSU) and a classroom teacher at Health Sciences High and Middle College. He is the recipient of an International Reading Association Celebrate Literacy Award and the Farmer Award for excellence in writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as a Christa McAuliffe Award for excellence in teacher education. He has published numerous articles on reading and literacy, differentiated instruction, and curriculum design as well as books, such as Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents (with Gay Ivey), Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work (with Nancy Frey), and Teaching English Language Learners: A Differentiated Approach (with Carol Rothenberg). He has taught a variety of courses in SDSU's teacher-credentialing program as well as graduate-level courses on English language development and literacy. An early intervention specialist and language development specialist, he has taught high school English, writing, and literacy development to public school students. He can be reached at dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu.

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Content-Area Conversations: How to Plan Discussion-Based Lessons for Diverse Language Learners

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Douglas Fisher is a Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education at San Diego State University (SDSU) and a classroom teacher at Health Sciences High and Middle College.

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by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.

-Linus Pauling

It's a safe bet that the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling didn't arrive at all of his good ideas by remaining silent. Chances are very good that there was a lot of talk going on at his Caltech lab as he and his colleagues worked out the problem of electronegativity and its relationship to ionic bonds between atoms. (Talk about academic discourse!) Of course, this didn't occur in an unruly or chaotic environment; the learning goals and social rules of conversations were just as important there as in any classroom.

As educators, we know that learning is social and that peer interactions help extend understanding. The idea that peers can scaffold new learning effectively for one another was one of Lev Vygotsky's great contributions to our field. Yet many teachers are reluctant to turn the class over to collaborative learning, for fear that they will lose control and thus lose valuable instructional time. We don't base this claim on observation alone. A study of the experiences of 1,000 elementary students across the United States found that they spent 91 percent of their days in either whole-group or independent seatwork, with only 4.8 percent engaged with peers in a learning activity (Pianta, Belsky, Houts, & Morrison, 2007). It isn't for lack of teacher knowledge, either, as 90 percent of the teachers held a credential, and 44 percent possessed a master's degree.

Moving into English with Peers

As we have stated throughout this book, English language learners need lots of opportunities to apply their growing knowledge in order to learn English and learn in English. Their acquisition of academic language is certainly initiated through the modeling of teachers and reinforced and extended through classroom discourse. In addition, teachers provide more specific supports during small-group guided instruction. This approach does have its limits, however. For example, Zwiers's (2007) study of the practices of middle school teachers found that in too many cases the questions they posed to English language learners differed in complexity (concrete versus abstract) and the teachers accepted more superficial answers from these students than they did from native speakers in the same class.

Zwiers posited that students who speak English as a first language arrive in school with a higher "academic capital" that allows them to speak a school type of language that is valued (2007, p. 94). Therefore, they are more adept at using the discourse of comparing and contrasting, interpretation, evaluation, and description. But many English language learners, especially those at the secondary level, report that they have limited opportunities to interact with native speakers in their classes and that this is a factor in the separateness between the two student groups (Daoud & Quiocho, 2005).

Even in the very best of classrooms, the ones in which teachers ask sophisticated questions of English language learners and provide prompts to guide their students' thinking, learning is stunted without peer interactions. Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock's (2001) analysis of effective instructional strategies identifies cooperative learning with peers as one of nine research-based strategies with a large effect size (.78). In particular, small-group interactions with peers offer several benefits for English language learners:

Repetition of key words and phrases;

Functional, context-relevant speech;

Rich feedback; and

Reduced student anxiety. (Hill & Flynn, 2006, p. 56)

Although we believe a strong research base exists for creating opportunities for students to work together, we also recognize the reluctance many teachers have about using such an approach. Some have concerns about management-a fear of the proverbial cocktail party breaking out and an exhausting attempt to restore order-and some labor under the misconception that real learning can occur only under a teacher's direct instruction. In the following section, we will describe a set of principles for managing academic discourse among peers and specific strategies that foster learning English while learning in English.

Managing Classroom Talk to Enhance Learning

The talk of the classroom is necessarily academic in nature and includes a variety of cognitive functions that help students explain their thinking and learn from others. For instance, students need to be able to compare and contrast ideas, ask questions, and describe phenomena. We find it useful to provide sentence starters related to the different types of thinking necessary in any learning environment. We post these sentence starters around the room and refer to them during guided instruction. In addition, we remind students of the language objectives for the types of language they will use in their collaborative learning activity. A copy of the poster we use in our classes appears in Figure 5.1.

When students are learning a new language, their receptive skills typically develop in advance of their productive skills. English language learners may indeed understand the discussion in a classroom, but they may have difficulty finding the language they need to express the depth and complexity of their thinking. Using sentence frames can relieve the linguistic load, allowing students to focus on the content while they practice academic language. Some educators may argue that this framing of language results in shallow and contrived discourse, stifling critical thinking. And indeed, when students first begin to use these frames, their language will likely sound stilted and rehearsed. But then, isn't that the natural progression of learning any new skill? First we watch, then we mimic, and then we begin to appropriate, adjusting our use of the skill to suit our own style. Linguistic frames serve as a way to scaffold and differentiate both oral and written tasks for students at different levels of language proficiency. In this way we make the register, the style, and the word choice explicit, identifying the rhetorical moves that are appropriate to the purpose and the context and helping students make their meaning clear.

Linguistic frames can be used at any level-from beginning language learners to native speakers, from kindergartners to adolescents. Harvard University education professor and author Howard Gardner even asks postdoctoral fellowship applicants to use them to guide their responses: "Most scholars in the field believe _______" and "As a result of my study, ________" (Graff & Birkenstein, 2006). Examples of linguistic frames related to cause and effect can be found in Figure 5.2.

Figure 5.2. Cause and Effect Linguistic Frames

Not available for electronic dissemination.

Source: A Focused Approach to Constructing Meaning: Explicit Language for Content Instruction

The academic language of the speaker is only one side of the equation-the listener also has responsibilities. Beyond basic social expectations regarding polite behavior, true discussion needs the active participation of others if there is to be an exchange of ideas. Lauren Resnick (1995) introduced the concept of accountable talk as a means of raising the level of academic discourse among students. Accountable talk governs the norms of academic discourse and requires that students ask for and furnish evidence to support their statements (Michaels, O'Conner, Hall, & Resnick, 2002). This ensures rigor and moves the conversation from task-oriented to concept-oriented learning.

In a classroom filled with accountable talk, students ask one another about their thinking and build on the responses of others. They cite evidence, ask for elaborations and clarifications, and extend understandings by using the statements they have heard from their classmates to form new ideas. We place a table card on each group's desk at the start of each collaborative learning activity to reinforce the need for holding oneself (and each other) accountable for rigorous discussion (see Figure 5.3).

Students take quickly to accountable talk, and many appreciate the guidelines because they prevent conversations from going astray. For example, consider the following conversation in Ms. Hirano's 2nd grade class as four students discuss an ant diagram during science. They have been asked to talk about the ways that insects communicate and to decide what body parts are used by the ant:

Kristina: Well, I know they touch.

Roberto: But how do you know? You can't just say "you know." [requesting evidence]

Kristina: 'Cause I seen them wave their-their-what are those pointers on their heads?

Ting: Right here [points to diagram]. Antennae. [offering evidence]

Kristina: Yeah, antennae. They use their antennae to touch each other.

Alejandra: We're s'posed to use that word. Ms. Hirano wrote it on the board-antennae. They touch their antennae to see each other. [using ideas from others]

Ting: Do they have eyes on their antennae? Show me? [requesting evidence]

Alejandra: [examines diagram closely] I don't see eyes. [giving evidence]

Roberto: The eyes is here [points to label that reads "eyes"].

Kristina: Oh, yeah, that's right! They can see! They use their eyes to see. [using ideas from others]

Ting: Look how teeny they are. They must not see a lot of stuff.

This is a typical accountable talk interaction among young children and is all the more remarkable because it doesn't sound contrived. They still think and speak as 7-year-olds, but the difference is that they are listening to one another instead of speaking in parallel. In addition, the conversation hasn't wandered from the topic, because the students are accustomed to working together like this. Taken together, the language goals and accountable talk guide the academic discourse of the group, without imposing an artificial structure that limits students' thinking.

Of course, these four students didn't end up together through happenstance. Ms. Hirano created a heterogeneous group of students with varied content knowledge, language proficiency, and social styles. In the next section, we will discuss grouping considerations for managing talk in the classroom.

Managing Talk Through Grouping

Although there may be a certain surface logic to grouping students homogeneously, the preponderance of the evidence shows that students of all abilities perform better in heterogeneous groups (Lou et al., 1996). It comes as no surprise that low-achieving students do worse in homogeneous groups because they collectively have fewer resources to draw from ( r = -.60). There is a very small positive effect for high-achieving students when grouped homogeneously (.09), but average-achieving students benefit significantly (.51) from mixed-ability grouping (Lou et al., 1996).

The composition of the members plays a role in the relative success of a group. Bennett and Cass (1988) looked at the performance of groups where either the high-achieving students outnumbered the low-achieving ones or vice versa. They concluded that groups that were dominated by high-achieving students performed worse because the low-achieving student was left out of the process. This did not occur when high-achieving students were the minority in the group. A formula of two low-achieving students for every one high-achiever or two English language learners for every one proficient speaker may not be feasible for every classroom, but it is worth noting so as not to inadvertently set up groups that leave learners behind.

Achievement should not be the only factor taken into consideration when grouping students. Flexible grouping patterns that allow students to work with many classmates over time build relationships and broaden students' learning experiences. After all, the workplace is rarely a homogeneous environment-we are called upon daily to interact and work with people who possess a range of strengths and areas of need. Flexible grouping patterns are based on variables such as these:

Language proficiency level: Students may be grouped together for a language lesson or heterogeneously to provide language models and facilitate sustained conversation.

Primary language: Students work with others who speak the same language, allowing them to discuss new and complex topics in a familiar language.

Skills development: Students are grouped together because they are working on the same skill.

Interest: Students study a shared topic of interest or are spread among groups to serve as motivators.

Work habits: Students are spread among groups to model work habits.

Prior knowledge of content: Students are grouped to share topical knowledge.

Prior knowledge of strategies: Students are organized to share strategic knowledge.

Task or activity: Students are grouped together because the task or activity has been designed to meet their needs.

Social: Students are spread among groups to serve as leaders or in other specialized roles.

Random: Random grouping ensures that students come into contact with all members of the class and build community.

Student choice: This pattern gives friends an opportunity to work together (Flood, Lapp, Flood, & Nagel, 1992).

To form effective groups, you must know your students well. When your classroom includes English language learners, you must be keenly aware of their proficiency levels in English as well as their understanding of the content of the task. Placing one student who is new to English in a group of proficient students may seem like a good idea, but in actuality, that student is likely to participate more with students whose level of proficiency in English is closer to his or her own: the English language learner will not feel as intimidated, and the other students may have more empathy and understanding of how the student feels. And, although it can be helpful to assign a buddy to a student who has just arrived with no English, be careful that the buddy does not do all the work and become a caretaker. Rotating buddies periodically relieves the burden of being the "teacher" and helps the new student get to know more members of the class.

Obviously, the ability to group and regroup students depending on the purpose of the task requires a physical arrangement of the room that facilitates movement. In Chapter 4, we saw how two different teachers organized their classrooms to allow for this flexibility. In some classrooms, the only solution to flexible grouping is to ask students to physically move their desks or chairs. At first glance, this activity may seem like an invitation to bedlam that takes valuable time away from instruction, but with a bit of guidance, students can learn to do this quickly and efficiently.

Students, especially those in elementary school, express a preference for working in mixed-ability groups (Elbaum, Schumm, & Vaughn, 1997). Students identified as gifted and talented in grades 5-11 acknowledged the social development benefits of working in heterogeneous groups (Adams-Byers, Whitseel, & Moon, 2004). When collaboration with peers becomes routine rather than anomalous, students settle into a pattern of work that is productive without being disruptive. Of course, managing noise and time also contributes to the smooth operation of the class.

Managing the Noise and Time of Talk

We believe that mismanagement of noise and time poses the biggest barrier to teachers' use of collaborative learning and goes a long way toward explaining the dearth of partner and small-group work in classrooms. Although school administrators understand that a quiet classroom does not necessarily equate to a learning classroom, most of us worry that the hum of activity could devolve into the clamor of chaos and that our teaching reputations will be sullied in the process. This concern may be especially true for new teachers, who know they are under scrutiny and don't want anyone to think they have classroom management problems. Even the best-designed collaborative task can be diminished by poor procedures that fail to take noise and time into account.

Managing Noise

Many children find it difficult to concentrate on the learning at hand when the din grows too loud. Much of the problem, we have discovered, is that students haven't had much experience at individually and jointly modulating noise levels, leaving it to the teacher. When working with young children, we sing the following verse from the campfire song "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt," repeating it in a progressively softer voice until we are down to a whisper:
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
His name is my name, too.
Whenever we go out,
The people always shout,
There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
Tra la la la la la la
This activity is a great way to teach about volume and musical dynamics. We pair it with a visual representation of the volume using a noise meter (see Figure 5.4). There's nothing fancy about this aid-it is made using a large piece of corrugated cardboard, and the arrow is attached using a brad. We introduce the vocabulary terms silent, quiet, moderate, elevated, and outdoor voice and simulate those levels using the song. Older elementary students don't need the song, so instead we use a lamp with a dimmer switch-the lower the light, the quieter the class is expected to be. We practice being silent for 56 seconds, or working quietly for 24 seconds, or speaking moderately for 38 seconds, so that students gain tangible experience with understanding the relative levels of sound.

Figure 5.4. Noise Meter

Source: The Effective Teacher's Guide: 50 Ways for Engaging Students in Learning

We then tell our students that we will use these noise levels through our school year: silent when we are taking tests, quiet when working or reading independently, moderate-defined as loud enough to be heard by your partner but quiet enough not to interfere with another pair's conversation-when engaged in partner talk, and elevated only during small-group work. Of course, we never use an outdoor voice inside the classroom!

The noise meter is introduced on the first day of school and is revisited each time we move into independent work, collaborative learning, and guided instruction. Before long, the visual cue is no longer needed, and the verbal direction alone suffices. When the noise level does get too loud, we stop the class and redirect attention to the noise meter. We have seen other colleagues use variations of the noise meter, like a traffic light or a large "noise thermometer" with a red ribbon representing the mercury inside the tube. One of our secondary science colleagues begins the year by teaching students about the science of acoustics and the effects of noise on learning. The common denominator in all of these examples is drawing students' attention to sound levels in the classroom and giving them an active role in monitoring it.

Managing Time

As we discussed in Chapter 3, releasing responsibility to students to talk with each other and construct their own meaning takes more time than simply telling them what we want them to know and asking a few questions of a few students to assess their understanding. It becomes particularly important, therefore, that we manage time effectively. By the time children are 8 years old, they show time-monitoring patterns that are similar to those of adults (Mäntylä, Carelli, & Forman, 2007). The rate at which they check clocks increases as time elapses, with fewer checks early on in a task. However, students aren't always as good at figuring out how much time is left. Setting a bell to ring at the end of an activity gets their attention, but it doesn't allow them to adjust their rate to meet the time requirements. A simple solution is to provide students with a means to monitor the time remaining. Countdown timers can be displayed using an overhead or a projector. In the absence of this kind of device, you can post descending numbers of variable intervals on the board and cross each off as the time elapses. For example, in a 15-minute assignment, post the numbers 13, 10, 7, 5, 3, 2, and 1 to reflect the increased clock checking that students will do. An added benefit of an overhead timer or chalkboard countdown is that it helps the teacher monitor time as well.

Managing Linguistic and Cultural Diversity

Noise and time management aside, another challenge in using effective collaborative tasks is how to ensure that all students are actively engaged in learning. One common fear is that students will spend their time talking about topics that have nothing to do with the task at hand. There are also the issues of certain students dominating and doing all the work and of students who prefer to work independently. When we add in the elements of linguistic and cultural diversity, we add another dimension to the complexities of managing oral discourse in the classroom. Here again, purposeful and structured planning, along with teacher guidance and support, can maximize participation and learning for all students.

Managing Linguistic Diversity

For obvious reasons, it can be particularly uncomfortable for teachers when students are talking together in a language that the teacher does not speak. Using the primary language in the classroom, whether it is the teacher speaking or students, is a somewhat controversial practice. On one side of the argument are those who believe that students must use English to learn English and that time not spent in English is valuable learning time lost. They argue that, for many students, class time is the only time they are speaking English, because they may go home to communities where there is no need to do so. We wholeheartedly agree that one of the primary goals for our students is proficiency in English, but one of our other primary goals is understanding of grade-level content, which includes progressively more and more difficult concepts as students move up the grade levels.

Consider for a moment this scenario. You are in a class as a learner, studying a subject you are unfamiliar with-perhaps stoichiometry, tessellations, or corpus linguistics. Would you prefer to discuss these new ideas in your native language or in a new language that you are learning-say, Russian, Portuguese, or Amharic? Language choice, like grouping, depends on the purpose. There may be times when students will learn more if they can talk about new and difficult concepts in familiar language. Of course, we want to be sure they are talking about the new concept and that they are on the right track. So how do we do this?

First, when we have created the type of environment we described in Chapter 4, where students understand the purpose of talk, are used to talking, and know that their ideas are important, we can trust that students will value the time to discuss and clarify their understanding. Will they do so 100 percent of the time? Perhaps not, though we would argue that the percent of time on task is not proportional to which language students are using.

Second, we can monitor student talk in a language other than English in the same way we monitor students speaking in English, by sitting with the group and asking questions, in English, to gauge their understanding. They must respond in English, which gives them the opportunity to use the language and vocabulary we expect them to use, with the added support of having first had an opportunity to clarify their thinking in a familiar language.

Finally, accountability is built into all collaborative tasks. Teachers may require students to complete a graphic organizer, write a summary, create a skit, or present their conclusions to the class.

Even when we require students to complete and turn in a written product as part of their collaborative work, this task does not necessarily translate into engagement for all students. Without careful organization, one or two students can end up doing all the work. In the last chapter, we talked about how to teach students to share responsibility, contributing to the discussion and encouraging others to participate as well. In addition to teaching them about the importance of participation in group work, it can be helpful to set up systems and structures that require all students to participate.

We often see group work organized such that each student has a role. One student might be assigned to be the recorder; another, the facilitator; another, the questioner; and the fourth, the timekeeper. Unfortunately, all too often, it is the English language learner, the student who may be most in need of language practice, who is assigned the role of timekeeper-a role that requires little or no language and certainly no interaction with the content. Moreover, it is not even a necessary role; as we've already noted, there are other ways to help students manage their time. This is not to say that students should never be assigned roles. In Chapter 3, we saw Mr. Barber assign roles quite effectively when his students were first learning to do reciprocal teaching. The difference is that in that case, each role is equally important in making meaning. Mr. Barber's expectation is also that students will practice all roles and eventually, as they become more comfortable with the process, will no longer need to be assigned roles.

One way of assuring that all students participate and learn is a collaborative structure called "numbered heads together" (Kagan, 1992). Each group is assigned a number, and each student within the group is assigned a number from 1 to 4 (or 5 when the numbers don't work out evenly to 4). The teacher asks a question and tells students to make sure every student in the group can answer the question. After a predetermined amount of time, usually a minute or two or more, the teacher spins the overhead spinner and announces the number of the student who must answer, perhaps number 3. Groups then have one more minute to make sure that student number 3 in their group can answer the question. The teacher spins again and announces the number of the group that must respond. In this way, students support each other to make sure they all can answer because they never know who will be called on. This strategy is most effective when groups earn points for correct responses.

The other major problem with assigning roles is that only one student is the writer. We prefer to see that all students are required to write their own copies, whether of notes, a skit, or a graphic organizer. Obviously, when the task is to create a poster, this is not so simple. Later in this chapter, you will see how Ms. Chang builds in accountability as her students create a collaborative poster. Each student in the group selects a different colored pen, and all colors must appear on the poster in relatively equal amounts. (She uses this meaning of equality as an opportunity to reinforce understanding of percentage in her math class.) Ms. Chang also insists that, regardless of who is the best artist or who has the best handwriting in the group, all must do both writing and drawing on the poster.

Once we've resolved the issue of all students contributing to the creation of the product, we are left with the question of how to ensure that all students contribute to its presentation. Even when students have written a dialogue-say, to represent the main ideas and events of the westward movement-it may not have a part for all four students. Because we want all our students to practice speaking in more formal situations, we ask that all students present the dialogue even if it means that two students will recite one part chorally. If they are presenting a poster, we give them time to determine how they will organize their presentation so that all group members play an equally important role.

Managing Cultural Diversity

Another challenge to managing effective group work can be norms of behavior, whether they are individual differences in personality or more general differences in cultural practices. In some cultures it is considered inappropriate for boys and girls to work together. Students from other cultures may be used to working independently and may be uncomfortable working in a group. Because we live in a society where people work together at some point in virtually all careers and walks of life, it is important for students to be able to step outside this comfort zone and engage in whatever configuration they may find themselves. Teaching students to participate effectively while still recognizing, valuing, and allowing for these differences can be a delicate balance. As we create an environment that fosters teamwork, we can hold frank discussions about cultural and personal differences and the reasons for learning to work both independently and collaboratively. We can also vary the structures for learning, sometimes grouping girls with girls and boys with boys, for example. And for those students who prefer to work independently, we can negotiate with them, allowing them to work independently for part of a project or for certain projects and progressively moving them into more collaborative situations.

Setting Clear Expectations and Outcomes

In Chapter 3, we discussed the importance of making the purpose of each lesson clear to students in order to focus their attention and help to build schemas and understanding. Setting clear expectations and outcomes is also an important factor in managing group work effectively. Many of us have had the unfortunate experience of designing what we thought was an exciting and interesting collaborative task for our students, only to watch it go over like the proverbial lead balloon. Upon reflection, we may realize that the reason for the failure was not so much the lesson design but that students did not understand what we expected them to do. Asking students to work together is far more complicated than simply assigning the odd-numbered questions at the end of the chapter. It requires making the procedures of the task as well as the expectations for quality and substance of the outcome crystal clear for all students. This may mean showing models of completed work, writing the directions in addition to telling the students what to do, or modeling how to do the task (as we saw with the fishbowl). Posters of the steps involved in each collaborative task are one way of helping students learn what they are supposed to do.

Mr. Lopez, a 2nd grade teacher, and Ms. King, a 10th grade world history teacher, both use the same procedures to make sure students know what the assignment is. They write the steps of the task on an overhead or chart, tell the students what they will be doing, and then ask a student to tell the class what the first step is. They then ask another student to tell the class what the first student said. This repetition encourages all students to listen and has the added benefit for English language learners, who may have difficulty in comprehending multistep directions, of giving them multiple opportunities to hear the directions.

Managing Talk in Pairs

Partner talk is the bread and butter of a classroom filled with the talk of learning. Teachers most commonly invite students to "turn to a partner" to discuss the topic of the moment. As noted in Chapter 4, this simple partner-talk method should be used frequently to allow students lots of opportunities to apply new learning. But work accomplished in pairs is also done during collaborative learning activities designed to move students to an increased level of independence.

Busy Bees

In Chapter 3, kindergarten teacher Mr. Velez used the "busy bees" strategy to foster partner talk with his students as they shared their opinions about a recent visit to the zoo. This activity is suitable for children in kindergarten through 2nd grade. The teacher introduces the activity by explaining how bumblebees fly. The children, who are on their feet, mimic the buzzing sound and slow movement of bumblebees as they buzz around the room. With an announcement from the teacher of "Busy bees, fly!" the students shuffle their feet and buzz until they hear, "Busy bees, land!" The "bee" they are standing next to becomes their partner for a brief learning activity. For example, 1st grade teacher Ms. Tyler gives each of her students a few math cubes to hold in one hand, along with a sheet of paper and pencil attached to a clipboard. With each "landing," the partners add the total number of cubes and write an addition problem on their papers. Ms. Tyler uses this activity in place of math drill worksheets to provide practice for her students.

Walking Review

Busy bees is not developmentally appropriate for older students, but a walking review accomplishes similar goals. Like the "Find Someone Who ..." handout used for students to get to know one another, this activity is an excellent replacement for completing independent worksheets and for reviewing material. Each student in the class has a worksheet to be completed and is given a limited period of time to find someone else in the class who can answer each question. Students sign their names next to each answer they log onto someone else's worksheet, and no one can provide more than one answer on any given paper. The goal of this activity is to encourage students to speak to as many classmates as possible about the concepts under review.

Mr. Clark uses walking reviews every Friday in his 8th grade science class to review the week's lessons on chemical reactions. "This is a great way for me to use some of the worksheet materials that come with the textbook program," he explains. He sets the timer for 10 minutes and moves among the students as they roam the room looking for peers who can answer each question. To provide his English language learners with the support they need to approach fellow classmates, he meets briefly with those who need it to give them questions to ask (e.g., "Do you know the answer to number 3?"). When he has students who are very new to English, he partners them with another student to walk the room. "I get a really good sense of who knows something and who doesn't," he says. Mr. Clark asks students to complete the last question on the paper independently back at their desks. "As they all drift back to their seats, the room gets quieter, and I can gauge how much more time might be needed. And don't forget, it gets everyone back in their seats!"

Explorers and Settlers

As with busy bees and walking review, this instructional routine also requires students to move about the room. However, this approach offers a bit more crowd control because only half of the students are in motion. The teacher begins by reminding students about the differences between explorers, who sought out new lands, and settlers, who cultivated the land and built permanent communities. Assign half of the students to the role of explorers (a good way is to divide the alphabet by last name), and explain that they will seek out settlers to discuss a question.

Ms. Lee does this activity in a rotation of three or four discussion prompts in her 5th grade social studies class. After assigning the roles, she posts the following prompts on the board:

Discuss the ways of life of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest.

Discuss the ways of life of the woodland peoples of the East.

What did these two groups have in common?

How did geography influence their different ways of life?

Ms. Lee used a countdown timer for each question so that the partners could monitor their discussion. As the timer approached zero, she invited the explorers to find a new settler and directed them to the next question.

There are variations of the explorers/settlers theme, including couch potatoes/aerobics instructors (physical education), electrons/protons (science), and carriers/borrowers (mathematics). Purposefully planning when using this strategy can scaffold language for students who are learning English. You can, for instance, assign students at early levels of proficiency to be explorers and then assign the settlers to be the first ones to speak. This approach provides an opportunity for English language learners to hear the language of other more proficient students and rehearse what they might say before they have to speak. When you ask them to repeat the process, it provides multiple opportunities for them to hear and use language related to the same question.

Inside/Outside Circles

In Chapter 3, Ms. Schmidt used inside/outside circles during her lesson in her 5th grade social studies class. This strategy also requires student movement and is intended to extend thinking through multiple conversations. Two concentric circles of students stand and face one another. The teacher poses a question to the class, and the partners talk for a brief time (usually 30-60 seconds). At the signal, the outer circle rotates one position to the left to face a new partner. The conversation continues for several rotations.

Mr. Garland uses inside/outside circles in his 10th grade English class to get discussion going about a thought-provoking question. "You've got to ask a good, meaty question," he cautions, "or they'll run out of things to say pretty quickly." His class will be reading a variety of titles to explore the essential question "When does the desire to obtain something or someone become destructive?" For several minutes, students explore this idea with a series of partners, while Mr. Garland listens in on the conversations. "It helps me to make connections to books I am going to discuss with them, and reminds me of what's in the heads of 15-year-olds."

Barrier Games

Much of what students are required to do in school is performance driven-solving math problems, completing science labs, and the like. A tremendous amount of academic discourse is needed to do such tasks, but English language learners sometimes rely on other methods of communication, such as gestures, to substitute for technical vocabulary. Barrier games are joint tasks completed by partners who have an obstruction blocking their field of view. For them to succeed, they must rely on clear communication and precise vocabulary. Here are some examples of barrier games:

Sequencing a set of pictures in the correct order to illustrate the steps to making and glazing a ceramic pot

Giving a partner directions to draw the life cycle of a butterfly

Describing the difference between two similar illustrations of molecules

Solving a crossword puzzle where each partner has half of the clues

Mr. Dare requires the students in his woodshop class to be able to correctly name each type of equipment used in the class. He assigns partners and places a low cardboard shield on the desk so that they cannot see the cards the other holds. One partner has an unlabeled photograph of a piece of shop equipment, while the other has written descriptions of each. The partners work together to describe and match each photo with its correct name and purpose. Only after students have completed this task are they allowed to operate any of the equipment.

Managing Talk in Groups

Some instructional tasks require the give-and-take of a slightly larger group of students. Collaborative learning among four students is a bit more active than partner activities, so the noise meter is useful when setting up these tasks. In addition, group tasks tend to be a bit longer than those accomplished in pairs, so a display of elapsed time gives students a way of monitoring their progress and adjusting their rate of work.

Collaborative Posters

A jointly produced final product is useful for group tasks because it gives all the members a shared focus. However, a common problem is that these tasks often fall to one member who does all the writing (and, therefore, much of the thinking). An easy solution is the collaborative poster discussed earlier in this chapter, where each member of the group is given a pen of a different color and all sign their names accordingly.

Ms. Chang uses collaborative posters in her geometry class to get academic discourse and technical vocabulary going. Each group uses theorems to analyze an equation and produce a proof. As Ms. Chang circulates among the groups, she can immediately evaluate the level of participation within the groups and offer extra support to those who do not seem to be sharing their ideas as effectively.

Jigsaw

This instructional routine was developed by Eliot Aronson in the 1970s to support the efforts of a recently desegregated elementary school in Texas. The original intent was to foster cooperation among students who did not associate much with one another, but Aronson (2000) and his graduate students quickly learned of the academic benefits to this approach. Each student in the class has two memberships: a home group and an expert group. Each home group of four members meets to discuss the task and divide the work according to the teacher's directions. For example, a long reading might be divided into sections. After each home group member has his or her task, the groups move to expert groups composed of members with the same task. The expert groups meet to read and discuss their portion of the assignment and practice how they will teach it when they return to their home groups. Once together again, each student teaches his or her portion of the task to fellow home group members and learns about the other sections of the reading.

Jigsaws are also useful for creating discussions. Ms. Armstrong has been reading aloud the book Holes (Sachar, 1998) to her 4th grade students for the last two weeks. After creating home groups of four students, she tells them to decide who will become an expert on each of the following questions:

In what ways does Stanley Yelnats change throughout the story? Is he a better person?

Is Stanley a hero, or is he just a person who makes good choices? What's the difference?

Why do you think the author entitled this book Holes?

Do you think that the Yelnats family's bad luck was due to a curse or something else?

Ms. Armstrong's students joined expert groups to discuss their assigned question at length and debate various ideas raised during the conversations. After 15 minutes, they rejoined their home groups to discuss all four of the questions as each member took a turn facilitating the dialogue.

Managing Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Thinking

Although the focus of this book is oral discourse in the classroom, we are reminded that oracy and literacy are inextricably intertwined. We use talk to prepare students before they read or write, to enhance comprehension and improve writing, and to encourage reflection and self-monitoring after reading or writing. Perhaps most important, we use talk as a means of engaging students in high levels of critical thinking. As we saw in Chapter 3, opportunities for talk are continuously and seamlessly integrated into opportunities to read, write, and think. Let's take a look inside Ms. Zamorano's 1st grade classroom to see how her students engage in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking.

Language Experience Approach

It's October, and hurricane season is just ending. Ms. Zamorano's students have been learning about weather and how it affects the way people live. While part of the class is working in pairs to write a description of what happens during a hurricane, Ms. Zamorano pulls a small group of English language learners aside for a language experience activity. These are students at fairly early levels of proficiency who mostly speak in short phrases or sentences.

The students begin by looking at a picture of a tree-lined street along the beach. The wind is blowing, the waves are large, one tree lies across the street, and a man and a boy hold hands as they cross the street. Ms. Zamorano asks the students to think for a minute about what they see in the picture, what has just happened, what is happening now, and what they think will happen next. She sets up her questions to elicit vocabulary as well as to teach and practice present, past, and future verb tenses. Together, partners tell each other what they see in the picture. Some students are speaking in isolated words ("Man," "Boy," "Tree"); others string their words together in short phrases ("Tree fall down," "Two people run"). Each student is able to participate at his or her own level of language. Ms. Zamorano draws a circle in the middle of a piece of chart paper and writes the word hurricane in the circle. Then, as the children share what they see in the picture, she writes their words around the circle, grouping the words in categories of things, actions, and feelings. The students practice the pronunciation of the words with Ms. Zamorano, and then they work with their partners to make sentences using the words.

As students share aloud their sentences, Ms. Zamorano writes them on the chart. Although she uses their language, she does model correct grammar, asking students' permission before she writes the revised sentence and then asking students to say each sentence with her. She helps them expand their sentences by asking questions to elicit more detail. Because she wants them to write a narrative, she guides them to group the sentences that fit together and then to sequence them chronologically. On another chart, she rewrites the sentences into the sequence the students have chosen. They read the paragraph aloud and then copy it into their journals. Later, during learning center time, they will reread the paragraphs, cut the paragraphs into sentences and the sentences into words, and then put them back together. The sentences are also used for practice in changing verb tense or adding different sensory words. The paragraphs are collected into a book for students to read during independent reading.

The beauty of the language experience approach is that it uses the students' own language and thinking to expand their language and thinking. Students learn to read and write what they can say and understand. They add to the language they already know. It can be used at any grade level, with students of any proficiency level, as a way to model and guide writing about any topic in any genre or discipline.

Summary

Although the management associated with promoting talk in the classroom can be significant, it is well worth the investment. If students are to benefit from the academic discourse, they must become practiced in engaging in it outside the direct supervision of the teacher. This means that the tasks must be organized and have a clearly stated purpose. In addition, the tasks themselves must be sufficiently interesting so that students will want to invest their time. The collaborative learning that occurs in classrooms rich in talk most closely mirrors the kinds of conversations that will dominate students' postsecondary lives. It seems that it is never too early, or too late, to foster language among learners.

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by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas. -Linus Pauling It's a safe bet that the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling didn't arrive at all of his good ideas by remaining silent.

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Oracy is taught during assemblies and wellbeing classes, but "it's embedded into every single lesson," says Gaunt. Students use oracy techniques in the classroom, every day, in every lesson -- guided by their oracy framework -- to discuss their ideas about Ancient Greece, problem solving, and explaining their learning in maths.

From forming different groupings to using talking points, learn how you can integrate strategies for effective talk in your classroom.

How It's Done

Embedding Oracy Into Your Classroom (It's Already Happening)

The first step in embedding oracy into your classroom is accepting that it already happens -- your students talk a lot, and you can leverage that, suggests Gaunt. "You start from the idea that talking isn't an extra thing," she advises. "It's children discussing ideas with each other and coming up with their own conclusions. Talk supports thinking, and that means it supports learning."

Teaching oracy means putting more intention behind how you guide and organize your students' talk. When they gather for group work or discussions, give them talking guidelines, roles, and tools. For example, sentence stems are starting phrases that help them complete their thinking in a full sentence and add intention to how they form their thoughts and communicate their learning.

Create Discussion Guidelines With Your Students

Creating discussion guidelines with your students is a great place to start implementing oracy in your classroom. "Once you've got them, it encourages you to include a lot more discussion within your lessons, and it also gives you a framework for those discussions," says Gaunt. "Having a clear set of guidelines makes sure that discussion is focused and that it has good learning outcomes, as well."

Create your discussion guidelines with your students. Show them examples of what good and bad discussion looks like. You can show them a prerecorded video, or model for them with another educator. "Through looking at the differences between good and bad discussion, we were able to say, 'These are the five or six key things that we think make a really good discussion.' And they become our discussion guidelines," says Gaunt.

Here are a few of the discussion guidelines that School 21 students have created:

Always respect each other's ideas.

Be prepared to change your mind.

Come to a shared agreement.

Clarify, challenge, summarize, and build on each other's ideas.

Invite someone to contribute by asking a question.

Show proof of listening.

"If you don't show proof of listening, that means the person who's talking doesn't feel like they have the proper respect, and they don't feel like they're important in the discussion," explains Milo.

Guide Your Students to Reach a Shared Agreement

It's common for young children to stay stuck in their beliefs and want to get their opinions across, which is one reason why it's important for them "to try to reach a shared agreement," explains Gaunt, "but sometimes that's not going to happen." A shared agreement lets students know that it's OK to change their mind, as well as the progression of their discussion and how it's going to end: They will share their ideas, listen to each other, possibly change their minds, and then come to an agreement. Understanding the flow of discussion helps to guide them through it.

Help Your Students Analyze Discussion Guidelines

Use talk detectives -- one or two students who go around the room and observe their peers talking in group discussions -- not only to help enforce the guidelines but also to give students an opportunity to reflect on them. Your talk detectives will have a sheet of paper with the discussion guidelines on one side, and then three boxes to the right of it where they can write students' names and what they said that fit within the guidelines. "For example," explains Milo, "somebody might say they invited somebody to contribute by saying, 'So, what's your idea?' They would write their name and what they said."

"It's getting the children to think about their conversations meta-cognitively," says Gaunt. "That's been really successful."

Consider How to Group Your Students

Each grouping will yield a different type of conversation. Consider how to group your students based on the different types of conversations you want them to have. When starting out, focus first on teaching your students how to work in pairs. In the primary grades, School 21 largely uses pairs, trios, and traverse (see image below), and focuses on the other group structures -- like onion grouping -- as they get older. Each group configuration below shows different ways to do partner talk. "The colors represent partners A and B," explains Gaunt. "A blue dot is always next to a yellow dot."

"We do a lot of, 'Turn and talk to your partner about this,' but what we noticed was that children weren't actually listening to what their partners had to say," recalls Gaunt. "We had to teach them what good partner talk looked like," emphasizing:

Looking their partner in the eyes

Thinking about the volume they're speaking at

Giving their partner personal space

Working in trios is good when students discuss talking points (usually controversial statements) where they start out by agreeing or disagreeing with the statement, and then work toward coming to a shared agreement among the group.

When they begin exploring how to talk in larger groups -- five or six members -- they start to take on roles to help them guide the discussion.

Create Discussion Roles

As adults, there are roles that we innately play in conversations, and we need to teach them to our students, says Gaunt, adding, "I used to think that if you let children talk, they'll just naturally be able to talk, but actually, we need to teach them how to talk."

In primary, there are three roles that School 21 focuses on initially: clarifier, challenger, and summarizer. "We need to teach them what those roles are, what they mean, what they look like in conversations, and the language and phrases that we might use if we're playing those roles" explains Gaunt.

To introduce conversation roles to your students, model them. School 21 teachers play recorded videos of themselves having conversations, and have their students analyze, identify, and discuss the roles they played. "They can then apply that to themselves and reflect back on what they're doing," says Gaunt.

Once your students initiate the roles without guidance, you can introduce them to other roles, like builder, instigator, and prober.

Create Structured Talk Tasks

School 21 uses Talk Tasks, structured activities to help students discuss their learning within a lesson. They often use visuals to describe their Talk Tasks.

In a math lesson about how time is measured, they have a visual split into two columns. One column shows six images relating to different measurements of time, and the other one has sentence stems for partners A and B to discuss those time measurements.

Talking Points, a controversial statement to initiate discussion, can be used in any subject. Talking points encourage discussion by navigating away from yes or no responses to questions, introducing students to a format on how to carry out the conversation. Students will either start speaking by saying, "I agree with that statement because" or "I disagree with that statement because."

In School 21's history lesson on Ancient Greece, teachers used the talking point, "Beliefs were not important at all in Ancient Greece," and had their students talk in trios.

Ghost Reading is a cross-curricular tool for encouraging students to speak. Have your students read aloud a text together. Leave it up to them to determine how long they read and who reads next.

Collective Writing is a piece of writing created collaboratively. Pick a topic -- whether in science, English, history, or anything else -- and have your students take turns speaking about it. They can offer a paragraph, a sentence, or even a word, whatever they're comfortable with. Write down what your students say, and then read it aloud when they're done.

In studying Ancient Greece, teachers form groups of five and have their students reach a consensus on who should be the new patron goddess or god of the fictional city-state Dasteinia. They share background information with their students on the geography, leadership, and income of Dasteinia, and through the roles of summarizer, challenger, and clarifier, they discuss which god or goddess would be the best fit. One student acts as a spokesperson to share out their decision to the whole class, and another group member takes on the role of talk detective throughout the discussion.

Build Comfort and Confidence in Your Shy Students

With time, the foundations of oracy skills -- discussion guidelines, discussion roles, and choosing the level of participation in structured talk tasks -- build up a student's confidence around speaking.

To ease your students into talking, start them off with sentence stems -- a few words to help them start their sentence. This reduces the uncertainty of what they should say, gives them a framework on how to focus their sentence, and helps them to speak in full sentences.

"Sentence stems are a way of scaffolding people to talk, especially when people are less confident," says Gaunt. "If you give them that structure to hang their ideas and thoughts on, and they don't need to think so much about how they're going to start their sentence, they're more confident to just speak."

You can encourage your students to build on each other's ideas by using sentence stems. They can say, "Linking to So-and-So's point, I think that..." You can also use sentence stems to have your students explain their learning by saying, for example, "I started looking at this math problem by..." Below are more sentence stems that you can use in English, history, art, and science.
English

A similarity between these texts is...

A difference between these texts is...

The author's choice of X shows...

History

In this era...

This artifact shows that...

This source illustrates that...

This source is biased because...

This source is more reliable because...

Art

I like this picture because...

I prefer the work of X because...

The composition of this piece shows that...

The techniques I have noticed are...

Science

The results show that...

The conclusion I have drawn is...

There is a correlation between ... and ....

An anomaly I noticed is...

I have observed...

Oracy is embedded in School 21's culture. Starting in primary, students build their oracy techniques in the classroom, every day and in every lesson. In secondary, they continue to develop their oracy skills through public speaking. "We're practicing it all the time in every lesson we're in," says Matilda, a Year 9 student, "and by the time you get to Year 9, it's almost instinctive."

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Oracy is taught during assemblies and wellbeing classes, but "it's embedded into every single lesson," says Gaunt. Students use oracy techniques in the classroom, every day, in every lesson -- guided by their oracy framework -- to discuss their ideas about Ancient Greece, problem solving, and explaining their learning in maths.

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There is no Socratic seminar without risk. And there is no risk without trust. An effective Socratic seminar occurs because of the thousands of invisible connections already built among students and teacher.

At the beginning of the year, establish classroom procedures, routines, and expectations. At the beginning of every discussion, do the same. Hold students accountable for demonstrating the utmost respect for each other.

2. Let's get academic.

Use anchor charts to teach, model, and reinforce target vocabulary every period. Establish a way for students to recognize each other's academic vocabulary use (snapping, tracking). This ensures that students both identify and apply the target language, while offering ample opportunity for practice (PDF).

Practice gradual release of discussion leadership throughout the year. At the beginning, model strong facilitation skills and verbally label them for students. Collaboratively create anchor charts of what makes strong discussion leaders, participants, and conversations. Reflect on the day's discussion: strengths, weaknesses, modifications. Eventually poll students to see who wants to take a more active role in leading class discussions.

Directly teach, model, practice, and assess analytical and text-based questioning. The top resources for this, in my opinion, are from AVID (PDF). This skill is essential in reading comprehension, high-level discourse, and critical thinking. What I've found works best is delineating (PDF) between right/wrong, yes/no questions and those that produce discussion. Additionally, text-dependent questions ground students in the work.

3. Let's get prepared.

Choose a rich text that offers cross-content and real-world connections. I often use a whole novel as the basis of a Socratic seminar.

Create prep work based on learning objectives and student data. Whether students are in 9th grade Intro to Lit or AP Lit, I have found that prep work allows them to feel confident going into the Socratic seminar.

Repeatedly explain the purpose and expectations of the Socratic seminar. I use a contract clearly outlining expectations.

Implementing Your Seminar

Once the culture and preparations have been established, it's time to set the scene for the actual Socratic seminar.

4. Let's get physical.

A Socratic seminar is best done in a circle, where students are equal and I (as a facilitator and not a participant) am on the outside. There are two ways to do that based on the class size and dynamics: one giant circle for all students, or fishbowl style (where the participants in an inner circle have a discussion and the participants in an outer circle coach the inner circle).

5. Let's get ready.

When students arrive on the Socratic seminar day, I create a five- to 10-minute activity so that I can check for prep completion. I don't allow students to participate if they're not 100 percent complete with the prep. At the beginning of the year, this is harsh. But as the year goes on, students rise to expectations and accept that the rule is designed to ensure a better discussion (and often grade).

The first Socratic seminar of the year begins with a lot of direct instruction going over what makes a good Socratic seminar, what makes a bad one, and how students can get an A (targets). These targets -- which can shift throughout the year -- are based on standards and can include active voice, upgraded verbs, academic vocabulary, transitional phrases, textual evidence, clarifying questions, etc. Every Socratic seminar thereafter, I still spend time at the beginning directly establishing these norms and targets. I also have students set goals.

6. Let's get better.

I practice gradual release of Socratic seminar throughout the year. Early on, I insert myself into the conversation frequently. These interruptions can be feedback about strong performances or ways to improve, lessons about conversation strategies, highlighting impressive questions or insights, muting dominant voices, soliciting reserved voices, and/or pausing the dialogue so that students can self-assess and adjust moving forward. As the year goes on, these interruptions occur less frequently as students internalize expectations and step up as facilitators.

Follow-Up and Assessment

Assess student performance at the conclusion of your Socratic seminar. Clear expectations and guidelines are the key to the assessment.

7. Let's get assessed.

Establish clear metrics for success (e.g., using and explaining quotes, expanding on a peer's idea, asking questions that keep the conversation going) and make sure the class is aware of them. Socratic seminars can move quickly -- to ensure that your grading keeps pace, create a list of codes for successful interactions and use the codes to keep a running tally of student performance as they talk. You'll be confident that you got it right, and you can even show the students your methodology.

8. Let's get reflective.

The final element to any meaningful Socratic seminar is reflection for both students and teacher. Provide prompts for students to use to reflect on and discuss the seminar, and then have them plan adjustments for future seminars.

What I love the most about effective Socratic seminars is that they create the feeling of a college class. And my students deserve this. As do all students.

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Socratic Seminars: Building a Culture of Student-Led Discussion | Edutopia

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There is no Socratic seminar without risk. And there is no risk without trust. An effective Socratic seminar occurs because of the thousands of invisible connections already built among students and teacher. At the beginning of the year, establish classroom procedures, routines, and expectations. At the beginning of every discussion, do the same.

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Using Project-Based Learning to Teach World Languages

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Using Project-Based Learning to Teach World Languages

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The Challenges

Like other World Language teachers, I am constantly trying to focus on the essentials in order to create a standards-driven, communication-based curriculum for my students. I am also keen on addressing the necessary skills students must acquire for the 21st century as outlined in the wonderful document from the Carnegie Institute available at www.p21.org. How can I know whether I have achieved my desired objective? I need authentic assessments to evaluate target language proficiencies, while offering opportunities for greater engagement, for working in collaborative teams, for developing critical thinking skills, for managing precious time and resources, for emphasizing global themes, and for preparing students toward the new AP exam in French starting next year! On top of that, I want them to learn how to use proficiently the wonderful technology tools now available. Sound familiar? We work hard as teachers! Darn hard! Oui, monsieur, dur, dur!

The Rationale for PBL

And so I come to project-based learning as a way of bringing it all together. Projects provide opportunities for students to engage in real life communication, in context, with real people, and across the globe. I try to align my projects according to the California WL Standards, and the fluency stages of the Language Learning Continuum found in chapter 2 of the California World Languages Framework. I also keep the 21st Century skills in mind, along with the more familiar five C's from ACTFL, and the many things I have learned about literacy, and cross-cultural issues. I have found that the projects address all these things and more. I have tried to make sure that they also offer students the opportunity to be creative and to explore their potentials and aspirations. It is a lot of fun to see this in action. How about some examples?

Stage 1 Fluency Example: The Menu Project

In this project, students play the role of a restaurant owner who needs to develop and create a menu for his/her restaurant established in one of the target language countries of the world. Their menus must have at least five categories, and twenty-five items, all authentic dishes of the target culture of their choice within the Francophone world. They must decide on an appropriate name, create an address, phone number, website and twitter account name, consistent with examples they find on-line from authentic restaurants of the target culture. Their menu items must be priced in the local currency, converted in an appropriate manner for the target culture. The students then do a speech either in small groups or for the whole class in which they speak to the group as the restaurant owner, suggesting good dishes, specialty items, etc. They must say at least 15 sentences, and can either present live or on video. I have a rubric for the menu and one for the speech, and am looking for Stage 1 fluency, namely, formulaic language (memorized chunks of discourse combined with lists of works). I find that the kids learn a lot about a country of their choice, while having fun being creative!

Stage 2 Fluency Example: The Children's Story Book

We refer to stage two fluency as created language. The premise here is that students take the formulae that they have learned so well in stage one, and combine them together into their own created sentences. These statements no longer sound like memorized sound bites given back in the same formula, but rather in individualized, self directed expressions of thoughts and ideas. The sentences are frequently complex, but do not contain subordinate clauses of the kind requiring specialized verb forms. They also do not necessarily have to be strung together in a particular order to make sense - if we were to reorder them, they would make just as much sense in the new order. In other words, these are lists of sentences, but the order of the lists are not significant.

I have developed a project to measure this stage of fluency which I call the Story Book project. Students create a set of characters who live in one of the target language countries. They write the story as if the main character were describing his life when he was five years old (which requires the imperfect tense in French). The students then describe a big event which occurred in the life of the character, such as his first day of school, and then the things which happened in that day (requiring the use of the passé composé in French). They need to research what a child's life is like in the target culture and create an authentic and visually rich situation for the story's setting. I usually ask students to write about 5 sentences per page, and about ten pages total. They do rough drafts and peer editing. I also look at the drafts and highlight what is correct, and make some suggestions for corrections. The editing process is a learning experience of its own.

As students write their stories, they cannot help but compare their own lives with those of the characters they have created. The compare and contrast paradigme creates a good context for created language. It also allows students to try out their knowledge of how to narrate in past time frames, and demonstrate that they know how to use the various past tenses typical of the second year language curriculum. We often find that students reach what we call "linguistic breakdown" as they use various verb forms, but they do not necessarily do so at the syntactic level. They are able to make the sentence structures fit together well, even when their verb forms are not always correct. Frankly, I think this is great! When my focus is on the fluency stage, and not on distinct verb forms, I find that my students are actually progressing very well in their journey toward language acquisition. In time, they will perfect their use of verb forms, but in the meantime, they are clearly able to communicate at a higher level of fluency even if their accuracy is not yet up to par. We do want accuracy, of course, but in terms of fluency, this is a lesser problem for communication than is the sentence structure.

Stage 3 Fluency Example: The ABC Book Project

In stage three fluency, the text type I am aiming for is planned language, ie, paragraphing, in which there is a topic sentence, supported by concrete details and commentary, and a concluding sentence to sum up the important ideas. In French, this requires that students know how to create complex sentences, using main and subordinate clauses, requiring the subjunctive, or "if/then" type sentences, requiring imperfect/conditional tenses, among others (other languages may require knowledge of other paradigms as well). I have done this project over the course of a whole semester, breaking it down in smaller parts over time, and with the focus being Québec. We study many different aspects of Québécois culture: short stories, poems, song lyrics, historical texts, current events... The students do smaller projects along the way, but as a result of their inquiry, they write a page on each topic of their choice. I have them write 20 pages, one for each of 20 letters of the alphabet, according to their choice. An example page might look like this in English:

Q is for Québec City (title sentence). Québec is the capital city of the province of Quebec, and sits on a bluff overlooking the Saint Lawrence River (topic sentence). It seems to me that the people of Québec have much for which they may be proud (detail). It is necessary that they invest wisely in the maintenance of their historical monuments, because it preserves the diversity of their historical heritage (commentary). If I were to visit Québec, I would want to look out over the Saint Lawrence from the Terasse Dufferein so I could enjoy the beautiful view of the river and of the Ile d'Orléans (commentary). If I went to Québec in winter, I would go during the Carnaval so I could participate in the many activities (commentary). It is interesting that the local accent is different in Québec than in France. (commentary). If I go to Québec, I will practice speaking French with the local people and hope that I will be able to understand their accent without any problems (conclusion)."

This is a fair amount of work for one page, let alone twenty, so I provide a page template for students to use to be sure they keep on track. I have them do rough drafts of each page. When they turn in the drafts, I highlight what is correct and return the pages. The students may resubmit the pages with corrections until they have perfected their work. In this way, I am reinforcing their own editing process, and helping them to focus on the details they might otherwise overlook. This project has proven to be great fun, and I have found that by the end of the semester, they have mastered complex sentences and paragraphing quite well.

Future Plans

Next year, I plan to augment my project-based approach by connecting my classes with classes in 3 Francophone countries - France, Canada, and Sénégal. I want the students to collaborate with their peers across the world in writing digital stories which they will post on the web for their friends to read, and so they can offer comments and engage in conversations about the stories. I plan to have the students explore many story genres, including comic strips, manga, short stories and poems, and other kinds of writing as their interests are piqued. The many web 2.0 applications which are now available will be a big help in giving students the tools they need to write and create their stories. I expect the project to provide greater opportunities for engagement, creativity, problem solving, and collaboration ? ie, they will learn to communicate in French while learning 21st century skills!

Let's have some fun, too! Join the conversation. Post an idea on the Edutopia WL group. Need an idea? Got a question? Found a cool website, app or tool? Let's collaborate as well! Shall we get started? Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas ? together is better!

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Using Project-Based Learning to Teach World Languages | Edutopia

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Like other World Language teachers, I am constantly trying to focus on the essentials in order to create a standards-driven, communication-based curriculum for my students. I am also keen on addressing the necessary skills students must acquire for the 21st century as outlined in the wonderful document from the Carnegie Institute available at www.p21.org.

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4 Ways to Use Project-Based Learning to Support English Language Learners

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4 Ways to Use Project-Based Learning to Support English Language Learners

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If you are a teacher in America, chances are you have an English Language Learner (ELL) in your classroom. Take note: that number-approximately 10% of students currently-is rising. How do you reach and teach ELLs? If you currently teaching using project-based learning (PBL) as an engagement lever or pedagogy, or if you aspire to, you may find some inspiration in the educators we interviewed to tell how us how PBL is being used to support language learning and acquisition.

Buck Institute for Education is an organization whose mission is to create, gather, and share high-quality project-based learning practices and products. Members of the organization recently traveled with their national faculty to an island off the coast of California to lead professional development around how project-based learning (PBL) can reach all students. This includes the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELLs) across the United States.

As a network of project-based schools, New Tech Network (NTN) thinks about how to design projects-and a school-wide culture that supports them-one that is effective and inspiring. "We don't want to teach language content to our ELL students, we want to teach language content, and we want it to be meaningful with social purpose," says Alix Horton, NTN Literacy Coach.

Sache Crouch, ELL teacher for Shelby County Schools (Memphis, TN) said, "Using PBL in my ESL classroom has proven to be an effective strategy. It allows me focus on the required standards-based content and it requires interest from my students. It relates to something meaningful and useful in their lives."

Suzie Boss and John Larmer, authors of PBL for the 21st Century: Teaching Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication and Creativity , offer insights from their book in order to utilize PBL to engage and teach ELLs.

Here are 4 best practices for using PBL with English Language Learners.

Encourage academic content that is broken down for comprehensible input.

This idea of building schema is one way in which ELL students really benefit from PBL. Projects allow students to experience through creating and therefore pulling knowledge that they already have-despite the language.

Alix notes that schools need to be very intentional and thoughtful as to how scaffolding comes into play, from the initial explanation of the project to the student's presentation of their work. For example, presenting can be terrifying for ELL students, which is why teachers should have a plan to help practice and prepare (start with the individual, then practice in pairs, then small groups, etc). You use language to present to an audience and content is embedded.

Alix says that the tendency can be to have ELL curriculum simplified rather than amplified, which is why she has really appreciated the tools and resources from Understanding Language at Stanford . It is important to recognize project-based learning as authentic instruction, and integrating deeper learning and collaborative discourse can be really good for ELL students.

Some of the initial work of the cohorts has focused on supporting ELL students in building and presenting arguments. They have found that rethinking something as simple as a graphic organizer can be extremely helpful in supporting students in pulling evidence from text and sorting through that evidence to find the best support to an argument. Extending the opportunity for more guided practice has been key. NTN is excited to see that these cohort are also starting to spontaneously scale at the individual school sites. For these cohorts, it really starts with a deep analysis of student work and using the best practices they know to be true to intentionally scaffold learning.

Engage students in meaningful learning through flexible, individualized strategies and practical time limits and goals.

Consider this example of PBL in Sache's classroom: "In Memphis we live about 120 miles from New Madrid Fault line. Students were curious about earthquakes and how it would impact our city. Earthquakes are also a part of the science standards. The goal of the assignment was to create a news broadcast using iMovie to reflect what would happen if there were a strong earthquake at the New Madrid fault line. What are the effects? How do earthquakes occur? Students worked cooperatively and also had individual roles/assignments based on levels. Mini-grammar lessons throughout focusing on oral and written language. Peer and self assessments of learning. Time frame was 4-6 weeks. Once completed, we invited other classes to watch our broadcasts with us."

Model PBL for all educators.

New Tech Network has built a cohort of educators that are using improvement science to develop better supports for their ELL students. The work, supported by a Hewlett Foundation grant, allows teachers and schools with similar concerns to come together to analyze the problem, figure out ideas for change and go back to individual schools sites to try ideas out. It is an opportunity for these project-based learning (PBL) teachers to take on their own project. They work to divide the problem into parts, spend time working on each part individually, then come back together regularly to share findings and iterate. The biggest challenge can be the process itself. It is a very disciplined cycle that requires the time and energy of already very busy individual teachers, but it has turned out to be a great example of what growth mindset looks like at the adult level - the teachers have to be comfortable trying strategies and reporting back both their successes and failures.

Promote discussion and dialogue among peers and student/teacher.

Good teachers who do PBL encourage work cooperatively with peers. "PBL is an excellent tool," says Amy Carrington, a teacher at Tuttle Middle School in Indiana. "Through projects, students explore language in depth, building from what they know."

How do you use project-based learning to Support ELL students? Share with us your ideas at #SupportELL.
This blog is part of the Supporting English Language Learners Series with support from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more, stay tuned for the culminating podcast, infographic and publication. To engage in professional learning about PBL, check out the upcoming conference, PBL World in Napa Valley June 13-16 and join in the conversation using #PBLWorld.
For more see:

Bonnie Lathram is a student advocate and former teacher. Follow her on Twitter: @belathram

Megan Mead is an education advocate and blog contributor at Getting Smart. Follow her on Twitter @MegMarMe.

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4 Ways to Use Project-Based Learning to Support English Language Learners

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If you are a teacher in America, chances are you have an English Language Learner (ELL) in your classroom. Take note: that number-approximately 10% of students currently-is rising. How do you reach and teach ELLs?

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Supporting young children's language and literacy development has long been considered a practice that yields strong readers and writers later in life. The results of the National Early Literacy Panel's (NELP) six years of scientific research synthesis supports the practice and its role in language development among children ages zero to five.

The NELP was brought together in 2002 to compile research that would contribute to educational policy and practice decisions that impact early literacy development. It was also charged with determining how teachers and families could support young children's language and literacy development. Outcomes found in the panel's report (2008) would be used in the creation of literacy-specific materials for parents, teachers, and staff development for early childhood educators and family-literacy practitioners.

Through its work, the NELP uncovered a set of abilities such as alphabet knowledge, oral language, or phonological awareness present in the preschool years that provides the basis for later reading success. It also found that measures of complex and discourse-level skills are particularly strong predictors of reading success - a finding that is consistent with the fact that language is a complex, multidimensional system that supports decoding and comprehension as children learn to read.

In our book Early Childhood Literacy: The National Early Literacy Panel and Beyond,, we explore the NELP report, as well as newer research findings and the effectiveness of specific approaches to teaching early oral language development to establish a solid foundation for later reading comprehension. Below we expand on concepts to help educators understand how oral language relates to reading comprehension, word reading, and language development; where Common Core State Standards factor into the equation; and what teachers can do to foster literacy development.

Laying Down the Building Blocks
Through its research, the NELP discovered that the more complex aspects of oral language, including syntax or grammar, complex measures of vocabulary (such as those in which children actually define or explain word meanings), and listening comprehension were clearly related to later reading comprehension, but that simpler measures of oral language (e.g., the widely used Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) had very limited associations with reading comprehension.
Put simply, readers must translate print to language and then, much as in listening, they must interpret the meaning of that language. Numerous studies support this approach by showing that word reading and language comprehension are relatively independent skills, but that each contributes significantly to reading comprehension.

Simple measures of vocabulary in which children simply point to the picture of a word or name a picture are not strongly connected with later reading comprehension. Nevertheless, many studies have shown that vocabulary plays an important role in fostering reading development in the years before and during formal reading instruction. The role of vocabulary is likely two-fold. The words, and the concepts that they represent, are obviously of functional importance in comprehension, and vocabulary might also support decoding or the translation of text into language. The NELP established phonological awareness as a key contributor to children's ability to learn to read. Of course, phonological representations are part of the linguistic system and the ability to gain access to these representations may in part be a by-product of early vocabulary development (Metsala & Walley, 1998).

Reading comprehension depends on language abilities that have been developing since birth. Basic vocabulary and grammar are clearly essential to comprehension because each enables understanding of words and their interrelationships in and across individual sentences in a text (Kintsch & Kintsch, 2005).

However, children who comprehend well go beyond word and sentence comprehension to construct a representation of the situation or state of affairs described by the text. In some theories, this is referred to as a "mental model" (Kintsch & Kintsch, 2005) and it involves organizing a text's multiple ideas into an integrated whole, using both information from the text and the reader's own world knowledge. To do this, successful comprehenders draw upon a set of higher-level cognitive and linguistic skills, including inferencing, monitoring comprehension, and using text structure knowledge.
Take the following story for example: "Johnny carried a jug of water. He tripped on a step. Mom grabbed the mop." The literal representation of the individual words and sentences does not enable the reader to integrate their meanings and construct a mental model. Successful comprehenders understand narrative structure and couple it with their knowledge to infer that Johnny spilled the water. They then understand why Mom grabbed a mop. They also monitor their comprehension of stories-either written or spoken-and realize the need to make an inference (that Johnny spilled the water) to make sense of Mom's response.

High-level language skills used to create mental models of text are not exclusive to reading. In fact, children begin developing these language skills well before formal reading instruction in a range of language comprehension situations. For example, young children rely on knowledge of narrative structure to do things like follow a set of instructions, share their daily activities around the dinner table, or understand spoken stories, cartoons, and movies.

Assessing Early-Stage Development
The skills needed for reading comprehension come into play as students progress. In the early grades, for example, reading comprehension depends heavily on emerging word-reading skills. As children accomplish the ability to automatically and fluently read printed words, language comprehension begins to contribute more to individual differences in reading comprehension. Most children who score poorly on reading comprehension tests have difficulty decoding words and understanding language.

Those with poor word-reading abilities (i.e., poor decoders) lag behind their typically developing peers on reading comprehension measures in the early grades, even if they have good language development. However, those with poor language comprehension, in spite of relatively proficient word-reading ability, usually do not lag behind their typically developing peers on reading comprehension tests until they have had one or two years of reading instruction (Catts et al., 2005).

It's important to point out that what appears to be a decline in reading comprehension for poor comprehenders is not the result of declining language skills. In fact, these students' language skills were already poor compared with their typically developing peers at the onset of schooling. A recent report found that poor comprehenders in fifth grade (i.e., those with poor reading comprehension despite good word-reading abilities) evidenced weak language skills as early as 15 months of age (Justice, Mashburn, & Petscher, in press) compared with their age-matched peers who went on to become good comprehenders and poor decoders, and NELP found that early language skills were predictive of later reading comprehension development, but much less so with early decoding skills.

Subsequently, many students who are labeled as "clinically language impaired" prior to, or just beginning, formal education in preschool or kindergarten, do not necessarily have problems learning to read initially (Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang) Their later "decline" in reading comprehension is thought to be related to the changing nature of reading comprehension assessments: the texts used to assess reading comprehension in the early grades require less complex mental models and very limited language processing, allowing those with weak language skills to answer basic comprehension questions as accurately as their typically developing peers.

In the later grades, however, reading comprehension assessments contain more difficult passages that require more complex mental models. Poor comprehenders lack the language skills needed to construct these complex mental models and begin to score more poorly on reading comprehension assessments when compared to their typically developing peers.
Poor decoders with good language comprehension abilities may be able to compensate to some degree for their weak word-reading abilities in the later grades. That's because even though they might struggle to decode all of the words, their language skills allow them to bootstrap their way to the text's meaning, using their good language skills and rich knowledge of the world to help construct sufficient mental models to correctly answer comprehension questions (Stanovich, 1980).

Helping Children "Crack the Code"
According to our book, a key challenge facing the beginning reader is the ability to "crack the code" or, learning how written language maps onto spoken language. This is because better decoders devote greater cognitive resources to the processes involved in comprehending text. Children's oral language skills serve as the foundation for both aspects of reading ability-word reading and language comprehension.

Because few preschool children can yet read words, we must look at precursor skills that develop into word recognition or decoding ability. Knowledge of the alphabet and phonological awareness are both strong predictors of later decoding and comprehension, and it is evident that teaching these in combination has a consistently positive impact on improving students' later decoding and reading comprehension abilities. Rapid naming, knowledge about print conventions and concepts, the ability to write letters or names, and oral language skills were also good predictors, but teaching these has not consistently led to gains in reading success.

How the Common Core Factors into Literacy Development
With 46 states now working to implement the Common Core State Standards which include grade-specific K-12 standards in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language, educators may be required to adjust their lessons to align with the standards and assessments used to determine student progress.

But what if the road to success with those standards begins when the student was an infant, toddler, or preschooler? This question was clearly answered through the NELP's extensive research, which emphasized the importance of print knowledge, phonological processing abilities and oral language skills as important predictors of later literacy skills, and with evidence that teaching these early on can have long-term benefits.

Additionally, assessment of these early literacy skills is important for identifying children who are likely to need more intensive instruction to achieve success with literacy. By identifying and working with students across all literacy levels at a very early age, today's educators can take a proactive role in ensuring that students meet or exceed standards across the board.

Making a Difference: The Teacher's Role in Literacy Development
Interventions focused on fostering language aren't easy to develop or implement. The interconnected and complex nature of language comes with a long developmental history and draws on a broad range of linguistic and cognitive capacities.
Furthermore, interventions occur within a social context where motivational, behavioral, and social factors can impact the learning climate. Children's attention to language input and their willingness to respond to it are affected by a host of factors, including their interest in the topic of the conversation, their relationship to the speaker, the number and identities of other conversational participants, and the setting.

Even more vexing is the fact that teachers - the most important source of language input in preschool classrooms - have a history of using language in ways that may not be consistent with the interactions found by research to be conducive to language learning. Teacher's interactions that best encourage language learning include having conversations that stay on a single topic, providing children opportunities to talk, encouraging analytical thinking, and giving information about the meanings of words.

For teachers, key considerations for instruction include the fidelity of the implementation (an extremely important aspect); teaching children letter names and sounds by performing phonological awareness tasks; and understanding that there is no link between curricula with a systematic and explicit focus (i.e. teacher-directed) and negative social-emotional outcomes for children.

Response to intervention in preschool holds promise for successful early language development but several key issues must be considered. For one, preschools often serve disproportionate numbers of children who need Tier 2 or Tier 3 services, which causes staffing concerns. Also, more research is needed on the effect of interventions for children from low-income families, children with disabilities, English language learners, and children from underrepresented ethnic groups.
The NELP report, along with other studies of children's early language development, suggests that early oral language has a growing contribution to later reading comprehension - a contribution that is separate from the important role played by the alphabetic code. As such, improving young children's oral language development should be a central goal during the preschool and kindergarten years.

In the end, making strides in this area of a child's educational development can begin with a very simple exercise-shared book reading. Although various approaches have been found to improve young children's language, the approach of shared book reading has gained the greatest research support thus far, particularly when such reading is carried out dialogically, that is, with much language interaction between the reader and the child. Combining shared book reading along with other language activities with explicit decoding instruction in the context of a supportive and responsive classroom, can make the difference between a child whose literacy development is at or above standards or one who struggles with reading, writing, and literacy throughout his or her K-12 education.

References
Catts, H.W., Fey, M.E., Tomblin, B.J., & Zhang, X. (2002). "A longitudinal investigation
of reading outcomes in children with language impairments." Journal
of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 1142-1157.
Catts, H.W., Hogan, T.P., & Adlof, S.M. (2005). "Developmental changes in reading
and reading disabilities." In H.W. Catts & A.G. Kamhi (Eds.), The connections
between language and reading disabilities (pp. 25-40). Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Justice, L.M., Mashburn, A., & Petscher, Y. (in press). "Very early language skills
of fifth-grade poor comprehenders." Journal of Research in Reading.
Kintsch, W., & Kintsch, E. (2005). "Comprehension." In S.G. Paris & S.A. Stahl
(Eds.), Current issues in reading comprehension and assessment (pp. 71-92). New York, Routledge.
Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). "Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability." In J. L. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89-120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Perfetti, C.A. (1985). Reading ability. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Stanovich, K.E. (1980). "Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency." Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 32-71.

Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D., and Christopher J. Lonigan, Ph.D., are the editors of Early Childhood Literacy: The National Early Literacy Panel and Beyond, available from Brookes Publishing Co. They are two of the nation's top childhood literacy experts and served on the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP).

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The Role of Early Oral Language in Literacy Development - Language Magazine

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Timothy Shanahan and Christopher Lonigan explore the connection between early oral language development and later reading comprehension success Supporting young children's language and literacy development has long been considered a practice that yields strong readers and writers later in life. The results of the National Early Literacy Panel's (NELP) six years of scientific research synthesis ...

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Protocols for various types of conversations

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Protocols By Tag | New Protocols | Spanish Protocols | Portuguese Protocols | Protocols For Youth Engagement

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A collection of routines that promote engagement, discourse, and understanding.

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Discover some tips to help facilitate peer learning between your students. Through dialogue, peer teaching and presentations, students are better able to take ownership of learning.

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Often with technology tools, we focus on each student having his or her own device (1:1). Yet, two minds are better than one when it comes to knowledge construction, as social interactions play a vital role in learning. When students share -- or co-use -- a technology tool with someone else, there are pronounced benefits to the learning experience.

Through co-use of a device, students can:

* Co-construct knowledge
* Corroborate understanding
* Co-navigate the software

Co-use is a fundamental strategy for effectively using technology -- a strategy that we tend to ignore in schools. Why is this a more effective method? Imagine a student working alone on an iPad with software that is supposed to help teach multiplication. Yet the student is quickly "swiping" through problems until he or she gets to the game at the end, ignoring the content. However, if the student is working with another student, they are more likely to move at a slower pace and probe each other with questions about the content and navigation. Co-use creates opportunities for students to discourse about what they are learning and doing. Since most software applications are created for individual use, it's important for teachers to create co-use strategies.

Three Types of Co-Use

1. Student to Teacher: When there is a classroom of students with their own devices, teachers cannot easily sit down with each student. However, teachers can set up structures to create an atmosphere of co-use. They can model how to navigate software and the type of thinking that students should be doing with an "I do, we do, you do" approach.

During whole-group instruction, teachers demonstrate an "I do" by showing how to properly navigate the application. In addition, they model how to think when moving through the software. For example, they might state, "Once I click on the level, I need to decide which route I am going. The first option is nouns and the second option is verbs. Which concept is more difficult for me? That's the one I want to choose." Next comes the "we do," where the teacher can ask students to go through an activity as a whole group. The final step is the "I do," where students can progress on their own.

Teachers can create a paper checklist of "thinking" while using the software, asking students to check off thinking points as they progress. In addition, teachers can ask students to periodically pause from their devices to "pair and share" what they are learning with another student. Finally, teachers should sit down with students as they work to question them about their thinking.

2. Student to Student: While many schools are using the 1:1 model, there are benefits when two or three students use one device. Pairing students gives them opportunities to share knowledge. While pairing can be helpful, giving students a checklist of talking points can help to push the learning and knowledge a little deeper. For example, you might have students take turns sharing what they're learning. If you're in a 1:1 classroom, consider using the technology to partner your students with students in a different classroom. For instance, assign them ePals (social media pen pals) from among their counterparts in a different location. Each student could "talk" to his or her buddy and discuss the content through a variety of software including:

* Skype
* Google Hangouts
* A protected Twitter feed
* A synchronous Google Doc
* Edmodo's chat feed

3. Student to Parent: At home, parents can co-use digital devices with their children. Instead of handing a child an iPad or setting up a movie or show on a laptop, they can talk with their children as they navigate the application or watch the movie. Throughout, they can probe their thinking with questions such as, "Can you tell me what you just read in that paragraph?" Teachers can send home a tipsheet on how to co-use technology with children.

Software for Promoting Co-Use

Most educational software is created for individual use. However, you can find some well-designed software created specifically for co-use. Below are examples.

Literacy Learning: Kindoma developed early-literacy software that focuses on interactivity between adults and children. Communication and literacy learning happen through video with drawing, game play, and co-reading. This is wonderful to use in a P-2 classroom when pairing older and younger students!

Write About created literacy-based software that can be used for a variety of subject areas and grade levels. Write About encourages collaboration through shared forms of writing, drawing, revision, and publication. The collaboration can work for student to student, teacher to student, and parent to student.

Assessments: GoFormative and ClassKick are both synchronous tools that allow teachers to create assessments for students. Teachers can synchronously view student work in progress as they draw or type. They can digitally interrupt the workflow to give individual students immediate feedback, hints, or encouragement.

Annotate is a synchronous tool that lets students collaborate to create animation or a live screencast to show their understanding of a concept or idea. The collaborative feature allows for both student-to-student and teacher-to-student co-engagement in the software.

Language and Culture Learning: ePals is a culture and language platform that encourages collaboration and co-engagement between students in different parts of the U.S. and the world. It's a safe social learning network (SLN) where students can learn the digital skills necessary for their future.

Project-Based Learning: Friendstrip allows students to direct and create their own animated films using authentic objects and pictures from their lives. It's built on the idea of students working together to collaborate on a production.

Popplet scaffolds students in easily creating mind maps and graphic organizers. It allows synchronous collaboration, thus enabling students from near and far to construct ideas together.

These are a few examples of software with built-in features for collaboration, sharing, and co-engagement. Please join this conversation and share what types of apps or websites you're using that are built on the idea of co-use or co-engagement.

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Co-Use and Technology: A Magic Mix | Edutopia

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Often with technology tools, we focus on each student having his or her own device (1:1). Yet, two minds are better than one when it comes to knowledge construction, as social interactions play a vital role in learning. When students share -- or co-use -- a technology tool with someone else, there are pronounced benefits to the learning experience.

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Education technology devices have become symbolic of the efforts to transform US education through blended and personalized learning--and desktops, laptops, and tablets are quickly becoming ubiquitous in education.

These tangible examples are, with the exception of few dazzling products, nearly indistinguishable. When we are shown images of technology enhancing education, it is rarely a picture of particular software or data systems--it is a student with a device.

Devices are crucial as a conduit for content; however, they do not directly improve learning outcomes.

John Hattie, an expert education researcher, conducted a meta-analysis of over 500,000 studies on student achievement. The chart below is an excerpt of the top ten influencers from Hattie's study, accompanied by a relative interpretation of the data for education technology.

*From "" by J. Hattie, 2003 Teachers make a difference: what is the research evidence?,

Though the "translation" column viewpoint may come off as a little extreme, it serves a purpose: illustrating that devices alone won't improve student learning.

Devices do, however, enable teachers and students to improve upon many of these influencers. They allow students to access a vast body of content and knowledge, as well as a variety of games and learning resources that meet students needs and interests in a more personalized way. They provide teachers with more data than ever before, allowing them to better understand each student's needs.

A teacher's access to relevant tools and resources that can meet those needs has grown immensely. Adopting this viewpoint, the interpretation column becomes much more applicable for education technology.

So, how do we make devices truly relevant and usable?

Placing devices within the context of learning theory can help schools and districts prioritize around education technology. One of the most common questions asked when a discussion turns to education technology is "What device should I buy?" For all of the reasons aforementioned, the answer is always "the one that does what you need it to do."

This answer is less than satisfying for most, who have hundreds of priorities and just want to ensure they get the right device for their students. The thought process is important, however, as the device question should be one of the last ones asked, not the first.

Districts should start with asking themselves how they want to improve learning. A good starting point might be the top ten list provided above, the complete list from Hattie's meta-analysis, or any other evidence-based research that provides actions influential to student learning.

The next step is to determine which technology resources are available to assist in attaining these goals. Though the market is vast and growing at a fast rate, there are a variety of software and content offerings, as well blended learning models that can improve at least nine of the top ten learning influencers (and many more further down the list). As goals are established and resources are matched with needs, a cohesive strategy will start to come together.

The final piece of this strategy, after ensuring there is sufficient Internet connectivity, is to determine which devices can allow for meaningful instruction with the resources and systems identified.

How do I choose a device?

The list of devices that can enable most learning resources and blended systems is almost endless. But keep in mind: management and maintenance costs can more than double the cost of a device over its entire life, and hardware that is continually buggy or breaking down will sit on a class shelf collecting dust (and wasting dollars).

The decision becomes more complex as districts factor in their wants. Many districts have certain needs, such as absolute minimum specifications for things like security, management systems, etc. Many of these districts also have perceived needs (translation: wants) of the fastest processor, the sleekest designs, etc. Separating needs from wants can translate into hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars saved on devices for each district.

But once the district's device needs are established, here comes deciding what should actually be purchased. Start the device selection conversation with the lowest cost devices. It's important to remember that no device is perfect: some require Internet connections to function, others are less user friendly, and too low of a cost can simply mean "cheap."

By starting the conversation with the lowest cost devices and having to justify additional expenditures, districts have a better shot at spending the right amount of their limited capital on technology hardware. Most districts spend between $300-$800 per device (though some go as high as $1,500). The closer a district is to the low cost side of this range, the more resources they have to reallocate capital to education resources that will directly improve learning outcomes.

What's next? A full rollout?

Even after simple strategic planning, a large-scale device rollout can be daunting. Starting small and gradually, scaling can help overcome this hurdle. The information gained by piloting devices for a couple of weeks will far outweigh several months of crossing every "t" and dotting every "i" of a large-scale plan. Too much time in the strategy and planning phase is nearly as wasteful as buying higher priced devices. Lessons learned from the pilot will help inform whether the device is the right one, and how to grow the program in a way that works for schools' and districts' students, teachers, leaders, and IT systems.

By asking the right questions in the right sequence, a district can realign its priorities to ensure it is spending the right amount of resources on education technology devices. While strategy and planning are crucial, they become wasteful if priorities are misaligned or the process is over-engineered. With the right framing and approach, schools and districts should be able to minimize the time and money they spend on devices, and focus their attention where it matters most.

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It's Not About the Device, It's About What You Do With It - EdSurge News

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Education technology devices have become symbolic of the efforts to transform US education through blended and personalized learning--and desktops, laptops, and tablets are quickly becoming ubiquitous in education. These tangible examples are, with the exception of few dazzling products, nearly indistinguishable.

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A few years into my teaching career, a colleague attended training at Phillips Exeter Academy on the Harkness method, in which classroom learning takes place as students and teacher sit in a circle or oval for discussions and all students must contribute. Afterward, she enthusiastically shared what she had learned about facilitating effective student-led discussions.

Until then I had been running discussions in the familiar way: pitch a question to the class, ask students to raise their hands, and try to be equitable when selecting volunteers to answer. The idea of giving students more ownership over what we discussed-from the questions themselves to possible answers-seemed like an exciting opportunity for us to learn together.

With practice, my students and I found success with the Harkness method. I also tried Socratic seminar and other approaches that emphasize student inquiry and collaboration. After years of experimentation with student-led discussions, I've honed three approaches that have made almost all conversations in my classroom both complex and enlightening. They start with students arriving to class having read a shared text.

3 Keys to Effective Student-Led Discussions

1. Make a case: At the beginning of class, share a single, open-ended question about the text. It should be an essential question-one that will elicit varied or even polarized responses. Have multiple copies of documents related to that question (literary criticism, encyclopedia entries, op-eds, news articles, etc.) and multiple dictionaries on a table for students to use-I recommend saying nothing about these and seeing what happens.

Instruct your students to work together to consider the question from multiple angles before ultimately voting to come up with an answer the majority feels good about.

This is a timed discussion, with the length determined by you. It may need to extend beyond a 50-minute class period, and could last up to 100 minutes. Remind students that they need to self-regulate-they should participate as close to equally as possible.

Don't participate, but after the discussion you should facilitate a short (10 minutes or less) reflection. Ask your students: What worked and what didn't? What could be done to make the discussion better next time?

2. Use genuine questions: Ask students to take 10 minutes to silently type or write at least one genuine question-a real, honest question about the text, as opposed to a discussion question that sounds like one a teacher would ask-about what they read the night before. With genuine questions you get a sense of what students want to know more about, what they're struggling with, and whether or not they're comprehending the text.

Once students finish writing, ask them to read the questions aloud, one at a time. Write the questions on the board for all to see. Then ask the class to thoroughly discuss as many of the questions as possible; transition from one question to another when the class agrees it's time to move on. You should participate but not lead. Multiple class periods might be needed to address all the questions.

3. Share a question, passage, or pattern: This technique, used for online discussions, was inspired by the "One Question One Comment" activity in Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading. After students finish reading an assigned text, they post one of the following on the class website: a genuine question about what they read and a short attempt to answer it, a passage that resonated with them and a short explanation of why, or a pattern they identified with a short explanation of what that pattern implies about the whole text.

If students choose to share a passage, have them point to a specific quotation they find interesting. By articulating why they like it, they notice exactly what it is about the language that moves them. Choosing a pattern enables students to find meaning in repetition-I have them search for repeated words, images, descriptions, or ideas. When they explain the pattern's implications, they usually begin to identify themes in the text. It's a concrete path to the abstract.

After posting a question, passage, or pattern, students should thoughtfully respond to the posts of two other students. At the beginning of class the next day, give your class 5-10 minutes to review what was posted online, and then have each student share either one lingering question or a new idea that came from a classmate. In my class, these comments serve as the basis for our discussion that day.

These approaches have helped my students see how questions are more interesting and often more important than answers. They begin to think more critically about every aspect of what they're reading, from writing style to authorial intent. They feel more ownership over ideas learned in class because they arrived at them, and in turn they become even more curious.

Student-led discussions take time and a teacher who's willing to step back a little. The results are worth it-when my students are empowered, my classroom transforms into an intellectual playground.

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A few years into my teaching career, a colleague attended training at Phillips Exeter Academy on the Harkness method, in which classroom learning takes place as students and teacher sit in a circle or oval for discussions and all students must contribute. Afterward, she enthusiastically shared what she had learned about facilitating effective student-led discussions.

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Five guidelines can build students' higher-order thinking skills.

Productive classroom discussions-those that enable students to invent, create, imagine, take risks, and dig for deeper meanings-can only take place in a climate in which students feel safe to offer their ideas. Teachers can create such a climate by being mindful of the essential conditions of interactive teaching.

Listen, Attend, Apprehend

On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer that teachers should listen to what students say. But in the real world of the classroom, with its many pressures and demands on a teacher's time, it can be difficult to pay full attention.

"Of course we listen to our students!" protested one teacher. But the combination of listening + attending + apprehending has dimensions that go beyond merely hearing a student's words. It includes carefully observing the student's nonverbal behaviors, voice inflection, and word choice, as well as what the student emphasizes or leaves out. Teachers who attend to all these dimensions are doing what Friere (1983) calls apprehending-taking in and making meaning of the totality. Here's an example from a 6th grade social studies class in which students are discussing the electoral process:<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Now that you've all read the case, perhaps you can tell me-what factors, do you suppose, influence a voter's choice in making a decision about voting for a candidate?<EMPH TYPE="5">Simon: This may sound a little bit weird, but I think that person's appearance has a lot to do with how voters feel about him.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: ( reading into the student's statement from his facial expression and from the first part of his response) It doesn't make a lot of sense to you that voters would choose a candidate on the basis of how he or she looks.<EMPH TYPE="5">Simon: Well, I remember my father saying that "democracy is dependent on an informed electorate," and if people are basing choices on the kind of haircut a candidate has, or if he has zits, or is wearing uncool clothes-well, yes, that makes me worried.

It's not easy to pay such close attention to students' words amid all the background activity and noise of a normal classroom-when the teacher is worrying about what Melissa is saying to Dennis in the back of the room and interruptions from the school office are coming over the intercom. But a commitment to listen, attend, and apprehend means that nothing gets in the way of complete and full concentration on what the student is trying to communicate.

When teachers make this commitment, it gives them the information they need to formulate an appropriate response that will promote interactive dialogue. It also creates a climate of respect for students, making it safe for all to offer their ideas. Some people might leap to the conclusion that while the teacher is thus engaged with a single student the rest of the class will lose interest; but happily, the opposite is true. When the teacher's attention is riveted on a single student, other students become more attentive, knowing that such concentrated focus will inevitably come around to them as well.

Clarify What Students Mean

Can you help me out here, William? I'm not sure I've understood you.

Frances, I'm going to try to say that back to you, and you tell me whether I've understood you correctly.

Once the teacher fully grasps what the student is trying to say, that teacher can formulate an appropriate response so that the dialogue can continue on a productive course.

Give Students Time

So much to be done! So little time! The pressure on teachers to get everything done by the end of the school day is formidable. That race with the clock often forces teachers to speed up lessons and makes them lose patience with students who need more time to say what's on their minds.

I know that pressure intimately. Like many teachers, I have had nightmares about finishing the school year with too much left undone. Nonetheless, I am suggesting that we give students time to think.

In the following example, 5th grade students in science class discuss the decline in fish stocks due to overfishing and contamination, and the consequences of limited supplies of these fish for the industry and the economy.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: How is it possible, do you suppose, that some fish like cod and salmon that were once abundant are now in short supply? ( There is no student response. The teacher waits for about 10 seconds, and then comments.) Perhaps you need a little more time to think about that. It's not an easy question. ( The teacher waits until a student raises her hand.) Ah, yes, Lin. I see you are going to make a stab at it.<EMPH TYPE="5">Lin: Well, I'm not sure this is right, but I remember a waitress in Sandy's Restaurant telling us that the reason that there were so few lobsters available now was greed. That's what she said.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: So what did you take that to mean, Lin?<EMPH TYPE="5">Lin: Well, I think that meant that instead of the fishermen being careful not to be greedy, they just went along catching everything-just so that they could make more money. I mean, they caught the little fish and everything and didn't give them a chance to grow.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: You're saying that the fishermen caught even the little fish, and so the fish could not grow to replenish the fish stocks. They did not limit their catch to fully grown fish only and that's how the supplies became depleted.<EMPH TYPE="5">Lin: Yeah, that's what I mean, and I think it's a shame.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Thank you Lin, for being the first to open this discussion. I really appreciate that. So now, who'd like to add to what Lin has said, or offer another idea?

We cannot have it both ways: quality of thinking and speed are anathema to each other. In conducting effective classroom discussions in which we ask students to offer their ideas, waiting for students to think must trump the rush to finish. In the end, teachers have to choose which goal is more important.

Appreciate Students' Ideas

How do students become fearful of offering their ideas? We've known for many years that a major barrier to productive classroom discussion is teachers' natural tendency to judge, evaluate, and approve or disapprove of students' contributions (Rogers, 1961).

Consider the following dialogue, in which students discuss a photo of a weather station at the Arctic Circle. The teacher's ongoing evaluative responses limit thoughtful examination of important ideas, stressing "answers" rather than allowing students to dig for deeper meanings.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: What did you see in the photo?<EMPH TYPE="5">Frank: Snow and ice.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Right! So what does that tell you about the weather?<EMPH TYPE="5">Phillippa: It's cold there.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Right! Good! So what does that mean about what life is like there? Anybody? Lillian?<EMPH TYPE="5">Lillian: No response.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Anyone else?<EMPH TYPE="5">Eva: Maybe you have to dress warmly.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Yes, but I was wondering about the way people live there, Eva, not their clothes.

Some teachers still cling to the belief that a big part of their job is telling students when they are right or wrong. Such judgments, however, work against a climate in which new and innovative ideas flourish. Students who fear being judged or penalized will rarely if ever, participate. The small group of students who are confident that they know what the teacher wants to hear may end up dominating the discussion, carrying on a private dialogue with the teacher while the rest of the class tunes out.

It may be asking a lot of teachers to shed the critic's mantle and replace "Right!" and "Good!" with responses like "I see," "Tell me more, Shawana," or "Thanks, Eva, for sharing your ideas with us." But when the teacher gives students a chance to expand their thinking and comments on their ideas without judgment, students feel safe to continue to examine and to go further in their thinking. In the following example, notice how the teacher accepts and appreciates Frank's contribution:<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: What observations did you make about the photo?<EMPH TYPE="5">Frank: Cold.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Tell me a little more about that, Frank.<EMPH TYPE="5">Frank: Well, I see a lot of snow and ice.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: So the snow and ice tell you how cold it is.<EMPH TYPE="5">Frank: Yeah. It's got to be freezing for there to be icebergs.<EMPH TYPE="5">Teacher: Where the climate is very cold, you may find some icebergs. Thanks, Frank. Does anyone else want to add an observation?

Accept Lack of Closure

The need for certainty seems to be part of our human makeup. When we've wrestled with dissonance and have finally brought a situation to closure, we feel relief, a sort of psychological "Whew!" Answers make us feel safe.

Even experienced teachers may feel a sense of accomplishment when our students can tell us, with certainty, that Ottawa is the capital of Canada and that Paul Revere designed the state seal of Massachusetts. Questions that have no "right" answers, on the other hand, make us feel unsettled.

This, of course, is the domain in which effective discussion occurs-the uncharted territory where we have to suspend judgment, put scrutinize nettlesome problems, offer new ideas, weigh alternatives, and consider different points of view. For teachers taking their first steps into effective classroom discussion, the prospect can be intimidating. For teachers who are comfortable in such territory, the experience is exhilarating.

When teachers talk too much, give too much information, express their personal opinions too frequently, or tell students what to think, all these seemingly innocuous responses seriously curtail opportunities for students to exercise their own brain power. When teachers instead respond with "Tell me more," "I'm wondering how you figured that out?" or "Perhaps you have some data to support your idea," they are inviting students to further examine their thinking. These responses insist on clarity of thinking, on reflection about a position, and on examples and data to support an idea. The ensuing discussion is likely to build deeper understanding.

Balanced Classroom Instruction

Teachers who have used the kinds of discussion teaching strategies described above have been enthusiastic about the results (Barnes, Christensen, &amp; Hansen, 1994). It's important to remember, however, that the key elements of effective classroom discussion are not present every moment of every teaching day. Sometimes a teacher needs to offer his or her own ideas ("I think that we all need to pitch in and help someone out who is having difficulty"). Sometimes a teacher will want to make an evaluative comment to a student who has done an exceptionally fine job ("Mona, I loved your story. It was so touching it brought tears to my eyes."). Sometimes students need to learn addition facts, multiplication tables, or grammar rules. And sometimes it's appropriate for a teacher to agree or disagree with a student, provide information, or explain certain procedures.

The art of teaching requires being clear about our goals and using teaching strategies that are in concert with those goals-consistently connecting our means with our ends. The goal is to bring teaching strategies into sync with our teaching objectives for that lesson. Productive classroom discussions are an excellent means when the objective is to promote students' intelligent habits of mind.

References

Barnes, L., Christensen, C. R., &amp; Hansen, A. J. (1994). Teaching and the case method. Boston: Harvard University School of Business.

Friere, P. (1983). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Continuum.

Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Productive classroom discussions-those that enable students to invent, create, imagine, take risks, and dig for deeper meanings-can only take place in a climate in which students feel safe to offer their ideas. Teachers can create such a climate by being mindful of the essential conditions of intera

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I talked with Cain about her mission of supporting introverts, and asked her advice on how to teach them.
So what does it mean to be an introverted child?
It's really not different for a child than for an adult. It's a person who feels at their best and at their most alive when they're in quieter, more mellow environments. And it stems from a neurobiological difference between introverts and extroverts. Literally, different nervous systems. Introverts have nervous systems that simply react more to everything that's going on around them, and that means they feel more in their sweet spot when there's less stuff happening. And extroverts have nervous systems that react less, which means that they don't get to their sweet spot until there's more stuff happening. And so this is why you see these different behavioral preferences. An introverted kid would rather draw quietly or would rather play their favorite sport with one or two other kids. A more extroverted child would rather be part of a big gang and a big noisy birthday party, and not only not be fazed by it but seem to really relish all that stimulation.
And it's different from being shy?
It is different. Shyness is much more about the fear of being judged. It's a kind of self-consciousness and not wanting people to look at you and feeling easily embarrassed or easily shamed. These are all the feelings that a shy child would have. And in practice, many introverted children are also shy, but many are not, and you can also have children that are quite extroverted but who are shy, and as soon as they overcome their shyness, you see them being in the middle of the big gang. So it's really important when you're working with children to understand what is actually happening inside them so that you make sure that you're responding to the right thing.
So let's talk about schools. Where do they come in?
You know, lots of schools are really hungry for information on how they can do a better job of working with these kids.

They're asking good questions: What indeed are the right ways to think about class participation? And are we over-evaluating as an educational culture? We overvalue the person who raises their hand all the time. Why is that important? Do we overvalue in quantity, as opposed to quality, of participation? Are there ways to think about class participation differently? Like we [at Quiet Revolution] have been encouraging schools to think in terms of classroom engagement rather than participation. Take a more holistic way of looking at how a child is engaging with this material or with their classmates.
One of the anecdotes I loved in the book was when the teacher had her students think for a minute before answering. What other kind of good ideas or tips can teachers use like that?
Another idea is the think/pair/share technique, which I think many teachers are familiar with already, but may not realize the power of it within a population of students. This is a technique where the teacher asks the students a question; asks them to think about the answer. They pair up with another student to talk about their reflections. And then, once they're paired, once they've articulated it with that partner, then you ask each pair to share their thoughts with the room as a whole. And this does a lot of great things for introverted kids. No. 1, it gives them the time to process. No. 2, it allows them to get the experience of articulating their thoughts out loud. But in front of only one other student, they don't have to do it in front of the whole class. And then, often, once they have had that warmup period with one other student, they're then much more likely to want to share with the whole class.

So this is a technique that works, it works equally well for introverts and extroverts. It's great for the extroverts, too, but it just happens to work well with the more reticent kids.
What do you think about using social media or technology in the classroom? Helpful for introverts? Harmful?
Helpful. Well, of course social media is such a big thing, so for introverts, there are pros and cons. But my first impulse is to say helpful, and there are teachers now who are starting to incorporate social media into their classrooms and report that the more reticent children are much more likely to participate when their means of expression is through their screens. They can type their answer into a screen, the other students then see what they have written or typed or whatever, and then "real life" dialogue begins based on the initial ideas that were contributed through the screen.

So in general I'm a big fan of social media. I think incorporating it creatively into the class can work. If we're talking about it as an educational technique, then I am all for it.
This brings me to another school-related trauma: the public speech. Should teachers kind of push introverts along, out of their comfort zone?
Yeah, so I think that it's important, of course. The key, if we're talking about public speaking or really anything that kids are fearful of, is to think of anxiety levels on a scale of 1 to 10, and to make sure you're pushing kids within a zone of 4 to 6.

If you have a kid who is really freaking out, they're really in that 7-to-10 zone, it's just too dangerous to push them at that point. They might succeed, they might, you know, do well and feel this is great. But there's too big a risk of it backfiring and the experience going poorly and the fear being further codified in their brain.

So you're much better off meeting a fear in small steps. The answer is not: 'OK, you never have to do ... ' The Answer is: "OK. You're afraid of public speaking. Why don't you prepare your speech and work on it first with your best friend?"

Give the speech to your friend. And then, when you've done that, maybe you can give it to another, smaller group. From there, you work up in stages, to finally giving the all out speech. You look for ways to make the experience less anxiety producing.
In the book, you mention that loving the topic can help kids get into their speech.
Making sure that the child is speaking about a subject that they're truly passionate about and excited to speak about is important. Because again, this is ... biochemical. If you tap into your body's behavioral activation system by speaking about something you're excited about, then that overcomes the body's behavioral inhibition system. Which is the system in your body telling you, stop. Slow down. Get the heck off the stage. So it does require extra work on the part of the teacher and an extra degree of thought and care, which I recognize is not always easy, you know, for overburdened teachers. But it goes a long way.
What about group work? Is that good for introverts?

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Strategies to Ensure Introverted Students Feel Valued at School

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I talked with Cain about her mission of supporting introverts, and asked her advice on how to teach them. So what does it mean to be an introverted child? It's really not different for a child than for an adult. It's a person who feels at their best and at their most alive when they're in quieter, more mellow environments.

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As a teacher, you probably spend a lot of time preparing engaging lessons, grading student work, and attending professional development. But, do you take the time to think about the questions you are asking your students? Do you pay particular attention to what they are asking you? Asking good questions and promoting discourse is an integral part of the teaching and learning in a classroom. It is worth your time! See some tips below on how to get started:

Observe another teacher. Pay particular attention to the questions the teacher asks the class and also individual students. Were the questions effective? How can you tell? Did the questions result in single answers or explanations from the students? Were you able to tell if the students had true understanding of the mathematical topics? What kind of questions would you suggest to the teacher?

Reflect on the questions that you pose in your own classroom. Use the technique of Question-Listen-Question. Get an audio recorder, and record yourself teaching. When reviewing the conversation, concentrate on the interaction after you pose a question as a means to evaluate whether or not your questions promote deeper mathematical thinking. Do your questions prompt students to develop deeper understanding or to get them to a desired answer? Is the student learning from the series of questions? Listen to students' responses and guide them based on what they are thinking. For examples of effective initial and follow-up questions, see Questioning Our Patterns of Questioning and Questioning Your Way to the Standards.

Set up classroom norms so that everyone knows their role in the classroom. The teacher's role includes orchestrating discourse by:

posing questions to challenge student thinking;

listening carefully and monitoring understanding;

encouraging each student to participate - even if it means asking, "Who can repeat what Andrew said?" or "Who can explain in another way what Bailey did?"

The student's role includes:

listening and responding to the teacher and one another;

using a variety of tools to reason, make connections, solve problems;

communicating, and make convincing arguments of particular representations, procedures, and solutions.

Ask questions that assess the students' learning. Try Think-Pair-Share. Call on students by name to invite them to contribute. These questions are not, "Do we all get it?" or, "Does anyone have any questions?" Rather, these questions must give the learners an opportunity to communicate their reasoning process - why they chose a particular method and how their choices made sense. Transform some of your closed questions, those that can be answered with one word, to open questions, those that require explanation.

Be careful to make this transformation gradually. Some students may not answer open-ended questions because they are only comfortable answering questions that they can be confident they know what constitutes an appropriate response. One way to encourage students to contribute to the discussion is to use the think-pair-share method. First, allow students to think alone about their solutions. Then, allow them to talk through their ideas with a partner. Next, ask two pairs of students to share their ideas with each other. Last, facilitate a whole-class discussion.

Identify, in advance, the big ideas that your lesson examines and the mathematical outcomes that students should achieve. Take time to brainstorm the multiple approaches that could be taken to work through similar problems and the misconceptions that students might have. Make sure that you prepare questions that address these multiple approaches and misconceptions, prompting a discussion about when particular approaches are better than others and how to explain why each misconception is faulty. Close each lesson with a summarizing question that reiterates the big ideas.

Use Fermi questions in your classroom to encourage multiple approaches, emphasize process rather than product, and promote non-traditional problem-solving strategies. Fermi questions are unexpected questions about the natural world whose answers are rough quantitative estimations. For example, you might ask your class, "How many drops of water are in Lake Erie?" or "How many balloons can fit in the school gym?" Encourage students work in pairs to construct a detailed argument and present it to the class. After the presentations, ask students which pair they think was closest and why.

When using closed questions, encourage each and every student to respond. It is good to mix up the kind of questions you ask. When using Yes/No questions, for example, ask students to use thumbs up for yes or thumbs down for no. This will include everyone and serve a dual purpose: each and every student will be more attentive if their participation is often required throughout the class, and you will be able to do informal formative assessment by taking a quick count of how many students seem to be grasping the ideas.

Use a game or other fun activity in your classroom, but be sure to reinforce the learning by asking students to think about their thinking process afterward. Require students to reflect on their experience by asking powerful reflection questions. Explicitly tell students that you would like them to explain their reasoning and sense-making. Ask questions about their strategy such as, "Was there a particular move that you could make to limit your opponent?" For more on types of powerful mathematical questions and an example of an elementary game, see Designing Questions to Encourage Children's Mathematical Thinking.

Use students' questions to evaluate your own progress. Are you creating an atmosphere so permeated with intellectual curiosity that your students are asking the questions that lead to the discovery of new relationships? It is a very powerful event when students take over asking the questions that get at the big ideas rather than just the procedures. Take note of the questions that your students ask. Are they asking more questions like, "Will you work number six?" or questions like "What would happen if we changed this parameter?" Strive for more of the latter.

Pose an unanswered question to challenge your students. Don't tell them right away that the question has no solution or a predetermined answer. Allow them to wonder about a problem, research it, and find that their speculations turned out to be wrong, or to come up with an original solution. If we give students only problems whose solutions are neat and clear, we are not preparing them for the kind of mathematics that exists in life. Real data sets are conducive to asking open-ended questions. Ask students, "What kinds of conclusions can you make from this data set? Which graphical representation is best for showing this and why?"

Base the success of your lessons on the extent of engagement of ideas and not on the students' happiness. Teach your students how to acknowledge and pursue the struggle and process of learning. You are doing your students a disservice if you present them with questions that they always know how to solve. You need to present them with problems that give them the foundation to struggle and move toward understanding. When they don't know where to begin, coax them by asking, "Is there something you can try that might work?" and "Are there any mathematics tools (technology or manipulatives) that could help?"

Leave a question unanswered at the end of a class period. Telling students which solution is correct is never as powerful as letting them figure it out for themselves. The extra time it takes for learning to occur is worth it! This may seem uncomfortable to a teacher at first, but it is more like problem-solving in the real world. Students will begin to appreciate the challenge and work harder outside of the classroom to come back with new approaches.

Use a partner quiz every once in a while, and allow each pair to ask the teacher just one question. This will encourage students' ability to ask good questions, while, more importantly, will promote student-student discourse. Since the students are granted only one question, they will tend to save it and justify their process with each other. Make sure that the questions chosen for the partner quiz are more complex than those chosen for individual assessment so that they have a reason to collaborate. Allow them to ask for anything but the answer, and be surprised that often a pair will turn in their work without even asking a question. For more on how partner quizzes work, see If I Only Had One Question: Partner Quizzes in Middle School Mathematics.

Give students the answer, and ask them to come up with the question. This can be modified to fit the needs and abilities of your students. If you are working with younger children, make sure you are very specific. For example, Write a story problem that has an answer of 20 cookies. Notice that you should include the units so that the students have an idea of what to write about. You may even add, "...that requires subtraction," for example. With older students, ask them to trade papers with another student without providing the answer. Follow with a discussion focusing on what words in the problems gave hints of how to solve them, what information was extraneous, what difficulties the student solving the problem encountered, and so on.

Prefer more specific tips about how to differentiate mathematics instruction for particular topics at your grade level?

Two books by math education expert Marian Small cut through the difficulties of differentiated instruction with powerful and universal strategies that teachers can use across all math content.

Both books are organized by grade level and NCTM content strand:

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Asking Questions and Promoting Discourse - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

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Asking good questions and promoting discourse is an integral part of the teaching and learning in a classroom. It is worth your time! Get tips on how to get started.

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The other student, whom I interviewed separately, offered similar reflections: "It's more focused here [at the charter school], and noisier there [at the public school]. I have ADD so I'm usually distracted." Beaming, he added, "but now I'm getting the best grades ever. I'm able to concentrate here more."

It's striking to me that a premise on Grizzly's website is that there are "students who struggle in school [because they] often lack social and emotional skills to succeed in the classroom," and the students themselves are quick to diagnose themselves with an inability to concentrate at their former school. The improvement they're describing at Grizzly, however, isn't based on a cure for a dysfunction or a breakthrough in social skills-it's just a significant change in environment. And in the five Grizzly classrooms I observed, the students sat in rows that Cain nostalgically praised in her talk-the traditional classroom setup in which, Cain said, "we did most of our work autonomously."

Certainly, group activities can serve a purpose in the teaching of introverts. In part because of the Common Core standards and the Internet increasingly serving as a proxy for classroom teachers, "cooperative learning" has grown in popularity among teachers in recent decades. As the English teacher Abigail Walthausen noted in The Atlantic two years ago, "Common Core standards place far greater value on small-group discussion and student-led work than on any teacher-led instruction." And overall, this trend is a good thing. Several recent studies offer the latest evidence that students who engage in cooperative learning tend to outperform those immersed in traditional learning approaches-namely lectures. But cooperative learning doesn't have to entail excessively social or overstimulating mandates; it can easily involve quiet components that facilitate internal contemplation.

Near the end of my observations last week, I told two teachers on separate occasions that I'd feel incredibly exhausted at the end of every day if I were a student at that school. To my surprise, both of them responded by immediately laughing and then agreeing. One recalled learning best when arranged in rows, while the other concurred, "I know, right? How exhausting it must be to have another student in your business all day long."

The ideal, of course, would be to establish arrangements that facilitate differentiated instruction for varying personality types, but this might be difficult in large classes with students of diverse levels of proficiency and motivation. I've noticed that, like Grizzly, the private schools I've visited also seem to create space for the introverted students, ultimately resembling the university classes to which they hope to send their students. And at the aforementioned public school I observed, three of the four classes where students were in fact seated individually in rows were AP or honors courses.

But I'm reminded of Sartre's famous line, "Hell is other people," when I see that Georgia College 's webpage dedicated to collaborative learning, which includes the topic sentence: "Together is how we do everything here at Georgia College. Learn. Work. Play. Live. Together." Everything, that is, except quiet introspection, free of cost and distraction.

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Michael Godsey is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and an English teacher based in San Luis Obispo, California.

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Why Schools Are Increasingly Neglecting Introverts

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The other student, whom I interviewed separately, offered similar reflections: "It's more focused here [at the charter school], and noisier there [at the public school]. I have ADD so I'm usually distracted." Beaming, he added, "but now I'm getting the best grades ever. I'm able to concentrate here more."

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A state Teacher of the Year shares her techniques for increasing the number of students who talk and share their ideas in class.

While it is possible to learn by listening, I've found that oral participation leads to greater gains in student literacy and engagement. English language learners in particular benefit from ample talk time, but they are not the only ones.

Yet I've also found that without careful planning, a few students do most of the talking while the majority of the class remains silent. My students all have ideas, but only some of them share those ideas on a regular basis. Adding wait time after I ask a question helps more students get into the conversation, but still the more confident students are more likely to raise their hands.

Because of this, I pay close attention to who is participating in my high school English classroom and to the structures I'm using to promote participation. I mix and match from the following strategies depending on the students in the room and my goals for the lesson.

9 Ways to Encourage More Students to Talk

1. Who talks first? When students turn and talk, I decide who talks first. The person on the right? The person whose birthday is coming soonest? The person with the longest hair? Without this direction, some students dominate partner talk time.

2. Write, pair, share: Many of us use the think, pair, share model, but substituting writing for silent thinking can improve both the quality of the conversation and the number of students who contribute. As students write, I walk around, reading over their shoulders and writing things like, "That's good. Say that!" on the papers of quieter or less confident students. I can also see which and how many students are stuck, so I know if I need to add more scaffolding.

3. Pairs and squares: I assign students a partner (pair) to work with for three weeks, as well as a square (two pairs combined). I promote camaraderie in pairs and squares by having students learn each other's names (with spelling and pronunciation), gender pronouns, and something people can't tell by looking at them. They also make up a handshake they use each day to greet each other.

They talk in their pairs from bell to bell between direct instruction about the topics of the day. Currently, my sophomores are engaging in a nonfiction unit on happiness, so today we discussed the correlation between money and happiness, and students worked in their pairs to annotate an article, but when we analyzed some rather complex graphs and charts, they moved into their squares so they could have more brain power.

After three weeks, each student thanks their partner for something they did for them and shares what they think was the pair's best moment together. By the end of the year, every student has worked with every other classmate-either in pairs or squares-which promotes a strong classroom community and helps students feel more comfortable participating.

4. Nonverbal agreement or disagreement: I have my students use the American Sign Language signs for "yes" and "no" in whole class discussion to show their agreement or disagreement with the speaker. This keeps students engaged, gives the speaker immediate feedback on their ideas, and gives all students a nonverbal voice.

5. Metacognitive goal-setting: Every few weeks, I have students reflect on their participation habits and set goals for a particular discussion. Students get an index card at the beginning of class and write a quantitative and a qualitative goal for their participation for the day. As they set their quantitative goals, I encourage them to think of "stepping up and stepping back"-what would be a healthy number of times for them to speak that day? Should they talk more frequently, or refrain from talking in order to make space for others to talk?

For their qualitative goal, they consider whether they need to ask more questions and whether they should do things like build on others' ideas or use text to support their points.

Throughout class, students take notes on their own contributions to the discussion, write down what they said (and didn't say), and tally the overall number of times they talked. They end class by reflecting on their participation. Did they meet their goals? Why or why not? Can they set some new goals for themselves? This card is their exit ticket for the day.

6. Talking piece: For some small group discussions, we use a ball as a talking piece that students pass around-only the person holding the ball can speak. Every student gets the ball once before anyone gets it a second time. This is particularly effective when discussing very emotionally charged topics, like issues of race or gender, when we want to be certain that everyone has the opportunity to share their experiences.

7. Musical give one, get one: When I want students to hear a lot of ideas, I have them write down their thoughts and then stand up, walk around to as many people as they can, and write down one idea of each person they talk to. I usually do this to music-students need to get to as many people as they can before the song ends.

8. Musical shares: This is similar to the last idea but is better for sharing longer, more in-depth answers. I put on a song, and students walk or dance around the room. When the music stops, they talk to the person closest to them about their ideas. I use a timer to ensure equity of sharing here-each person speaks for one minute.

9. Keeping track: I keep a blank grade book roster on a clipboard, and while students are working in pairs, I put a tally mark next to each student's name every time I hear them speak during class. I'm sure I don't catch everything, but the act of keeping track forces me to notice the participation patterns in the room and to seek out those who have learned to fly under the radar.

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9 Strategies for Getting More Students to Talk

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A state Teacher of the Year shares her techniques for increasing the number of students who talk and share their ideas in class. While it is possible to learn by listening, I've found that oral participation leads to greater gains in student literacy and engagement.

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Modified Workshop Elements & Planning Templates Packet