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This post is written and shared by my friend Cindy Dixon who could not stop raving about how amazing her class discussions are. I begged her to share with me - with us - her method and she generously agreed. Thanks, Cindy! - SB
I've always had big hopes for my students to discuss texts deeply and meaningfully. However, at times the reality has been awkward stretches of silence as I stand before the class posing questions about symbolism or dramatic irony. That's not how I envisioned my classroom as I aspired to be a literature teacher, I've always wanted my students to do all the thinking and to evolve into engaged readers-a part of a reading community. I became more anfrustrated with students "fake reading" and scouring the internet for Spark Notes and reading guides to pass a reading quiz. I also found that students were not engaged when I was assigning or asking all the questions and they were not reading either.

Enter the TQE aka Thoughts, Questions, and Epiphanies method of discussing texts. Marissa Thompson from Unlimited Teacher created the perfect way to help me facilitate the deep discussions I longed for in my classroom. Students meet in small groups to discuss and record TQE's for the assigned reading, record their thoughts, lingering questions, and realizations and generate questions they would like the whole class to discuss. Together the students and I choose from the submitted questions and the discussion begins. Students run the conversation by posing the questions and calling on each other. For the self-conscious or shy, participation is simple, low risk. They participate at least once by asking a question or responding to a fellow student's idea. Over time, their contributions only continue to grow. As an observer and guide, I reel them back in from occasional tangents. They can't wait to do the next reading assignment because they are making connections that resonate for them. They do all the thinking, and I am astounded by their insights. They need only slight nudges from me to steer them toward the required standards for the course. They may not realize it, but they are building their critical thinking and literacy skills, thus enabling them to learn about any subject further on their own. For me, it's a dream come true and for my students it's a skill that will serve them well far beyond the walls of our classroom.

But what about requirements I am obligated to meet in my district? I have to put grades in the gradebook and I have to teach skills and standards. Yet, I want this type of engaging discussion and deep reading to be the heart of learning for my students, not an extra task added on to the mundane set of questions or writing prompt. So, I've taken this discussion method with a twist and added a few twists of my own and from other great educators who share their work so generously.

Here's how I ensure skills and standards are a part of the mix. By adding in the skills for my course, in this case AP Literature, to their prep sheets I set the stage for them to develop questions in their small group discussions that incorporate the skills from the current unit. Below is an example of a typical prep sheet and then one with the standards/skills. For this discussion students will zero in on the specific skill while continuing to clear their confusions and and build their interpretations. These discussions have helped my students navigate complex and challenging texts as they submit questions for the whole class to discuss.

In teaching a longer work such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I combined lessons I learned from none other than Bryan Stzabnick of Much Ado About Teaching. His Six Scenes to Themes and his list of 50 Common Topics in Literature and Poetry which are not new to my students now become a part of our TQE discussions. A next lesson will be to write a complete statement of theme relating to one of the topics for the novel we are reading. As students participate in the whole class discussion and take notes they are making a study guide of sorts to review for the exam.

I started small with the TQE, mainly due to fear of failure. Nothing screams failure like thirty silent students seated in a large circle. My first TQE of the year begins with a short story and then we progress to a novel. For my most recent discussions, I had a student type a list of the whole class discussion questions from the board to keep as a reference. You can see those here. I'm so glad I did! I love how students begin to see the patterns in literature and make comparisons in structure, characterization, and setting.

Our next literary work will be Fences by August Wilson and I'm looking forward to those conversations. I'm so thankful for Marissa Thompson and her approach to engaging students in close reading of texts. It has truly opened doors for my students' understanding of literature and life.
Cindy Dixon lives on Isle of Hope in coastal Georgia and teaches AP Lit, AP Lang, and British Literature at Richmond Hill High School. She was the coordinator for EdCamp Savannah and has served as department chair, as an AP Reader, and attended the 2019 Folger Summer Academy in Washington DC. @cdixonedu (The App Formerly Known As Twitter) @cindytdixon (Instagram)

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Elevating Discussion with TQE - Much Ado About Teaching

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This post is written and shared by my friend Cindy Dixon who could not stop raving about how amazing her class discussions are. I begged her to share with me - with us - her method and she generously agreed. Thanks, Cindy! - SB I've always had big hopes for my students to discuss texts ...

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Authentic Group Discussions with the Real Talk Strategy | Cult of Pedagogy

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After years of listening to shallow student discussions, this teacher found a way to make those conversations more natural, more interesting, and more real.

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Strategies to Bolster Student-Led Discussions

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Strategies to Bolster Student-Led Discussions

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6 Strategies to Bolster Student-Led Discussions

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Student-led discussions can boost critical thinking and empathy, but they don’t just happen on their own.

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Even more on grand conversations -- and other structures

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Even more on grand conversations -- and other structures

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So much for my 30 posts in 30 days. Unfortunately, work commitments beat me this week and I am now about five posts behind my goal. My oral language workshop still prevails so tonight's blog will look at Grand Conversations in Primary Classrooms, an article published as a part of the Capacity Building Series. This series was produced by the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat to support leadership and instructional effectiveness in Ontario schools and the article I am referring to is 18th in the list.

I was introduced to the article when Lyn Sharratt (co-author of Putting Face on the Data) visited Metropolitan schools in February this year. Lyn chose an activity whereby each table group member was assigned a section to skim and scan in the article and then jigsawed to share the information gleaned.

Oral language is the foundation for the complex literacy skills that are critical to a child's success in today's knowledge society (Grand Conversations in Primary Classrooms, p.1) . The article begins by exploring the difference between gentle inquisitions (one talk pattern where the teacher is in charge and builds on a series of questions and answers) compared to Grand conversations (authentic, lively talk about text that has the potential to foster higher-level comprehension and student's attitudes to reading). The talk pattern of a grand conversation is conversational where students and teachers exchange ideas, information and perspectives. The teacher is a member of the group, stepping in only when needed to facilitate and scaffold conversation.
This methodology works beautifully when you consider: who is doing the thinking? who is doing the talking?
The critical first step is the choice of text - it needs to be stimulating and to support a grand conversation. It needs to be sufficiently challenging and multi-layered. For non-fiction, choose a text that presents content clearly and at times provides strong visual support. For a fiction text, choose books with interesting plots and characters, detailed descriptions and dialogue. Poetry and wordless picture books are also great choices. The limited text of wordless picture books requires students to infer, make predictions and to express personal thoughts, feelings and opinions. The images must be visible to all participants.

Modelling conversational skills

Students need to taught how to consider the ideas presented in the text, how to share and defend their ideas and opinions and how to build on and question ideas of others. Initially, teachers may initiate conversations, ask big questions and model appropriate discussion skills. They will also need to be ready to step in and offer new questions or prompts when redirection is necessary. A teacher's role will include assisting students to: accept different ideas and opinions; practise turn-taking and discussion techniques; and encourage the quieter students to have-a-go.

Teachers can model and students can practise these skills both in a whole class and small group situation. Anchor charts can be developed with students to record rules and norms for productive conversations.

The teachers' role in a grand conversation shifts form discussion director to discussion facilitator to participant as students gain greater independence and proficiency (again this fits with the gradual release of responsibility).

Examples of Authentic Questions

* What do you think the author wants us to think?

* How would the story be different if another character was telling it?

* How does the author show his point of view? Do you agree?

* What do you think was the most important thing that happened?

* What was something that confused you or that you wondered about?

* How did you feel about what happened in the story? What made you feel that way?

* Are you like any of the characters?

In what ways?

* Did you agree with what (character's name) did? Why?

* What do you think will happen next?

What do you think (character's name) will do? What would you do in the same situation?

* Is there someone in the book you'd like to talk to? What would you say? What makes you want to say that?

Preparing Students for Discussion

The paper lists and describes a number of engaging and innovative strategies to support student thinking about the text prior to classroom discussion. These include:

Literature logs and journals - students can record personal ideas, reactions, questions, connections and learning from their reading - provides sudents with the opportunity to reflect on and 'ink their thinking' (Donnelly, 2007) prior to discussion.

Consensus board - after reading a rich text, each student draws a picture of what they think should be the focus of the discussion. Young students can label and older students can write a sentence or two. The pictures are grouped and labelled so that students can see what is considered most important and worthy of discussion (McGee and Para, 2009).

Sketch-to-stretch - students use sketches to respond to a text being read to, with or by them (either at key points or at the end). Rather than a drawing, they use images, words, shapes and other symbols and then share their sketches in small groups as conversation starters (Whitin, 1996).

Close reading of a text passage - students are invited to assist in selecting an important part of the story and then read, reread and discuss the passage in a small group to work out author's stated and implied messages.

Traffic lights - a good strategy for independent readers. Students are provided with three colours of post-it notes: green for parts of the text they agree with, think are important or make a connection with; red for parts they disagree with, did not like, make them upset etc; and yellow for parts they found confusing, left them wondering or raised questions.

Structuring Grand Conversations

Grand conversations have many names: literature circles, books clubs, reading response groups and literature discussion groups. Students come together to talk about text they have read or had read to them in order to answer to questions the text as they look at it from different points of view.

My apologies to the authors: the following lists are basically word for word of what is in their article:

Teacher read alouds

Provides a context for rich conversations at all grade levels, especially when students are unable to read challenging and conceptually complex texts.

Most commonly used as a whole-class activity.

Frequently use picture books, both fiction and non-fiction,

Bring students physically close to the text and hold it so that students can observe the pictures

Students are encouraged to listen to the words and simultaneously examine the pictures in order to make sense of the text.

Often the teacher interjects questions to assist students in clarifying understandings and constructing an overall understanding of the message conveyed by the text.

After reading, teachers can use the read-aloud text to kick off a grand conversation.

Students form a circle so that all speakers can see and hear one another.

Teacher and students review collaboratively-established norms for group discussions.

Teacher introduces a big question or prompt to initiate discussion and scaffolds the conversation as necessary.

Shared and guided reading groups

Opportunity for students to practise student-led conversation about a text.

After using a shared or guided approach to read a common text, the teacher presents a big question or prompt related to the text.

Following review of the class anchor chart for grand conversations, the teacher withdraws, providing an opportunity for reading group members to engage in student-led conversation stemming from the question or prompt.

Teacher checks in with other students and observes the functioning of the discussion group from a distance.

After a few minutes, the teacher returns to the group and joins the conversation in progress.

Students are encouraged to share, explain and elaborate their thinking about the question or prompt.

Teacher may assist in resolving conflicts that may have arisen as a result of conflicting opinions or procedural issues such as turn-taking and conversation domination.

Before ending the session, teacher and students reflect on and assess the functioning of the group in relation to the class guidelines for grand conversations.

Literature circles

Small groups of students (about three) can come together around a common theme or big idea using one or more texts.

Teacher selects books for these small-group discussions based on student needs and interests.

After listening to "book talks" given by the teacher, students may choose the text for their group discussion by holding a vote.

Before beginning the discussion teacher may want to introduce students to various conversational roles - such as discussion director, illustrator, word wizard and connector - as a way of scaffolding student-led conversations.

NB Goal is for students to participate in grand conversation without taking on a specific role.

Instructional conversations

Whole-class or small-group discussions about a common text that combine instruction and conversation.

Intended primarily to help students extract information from a text.

Teacher begins with a specific curriculum goal in mind - a theme, topic or concept - and facilitates classroom conversation in order to meet that goal.

Teacher and students share their prior knowledge and integrate it with new information gathered from the text to extend understanding of the topic or concept.

Teacher facilitates sustained discussion encouraging students to share and clarify understandings, link new knowledge to prior knowledge and consider issues presented in the text from various points of view

Teacher brings closure to the conversation by summarizing, drawing conclusions or establishing goals for the next conversation.

Idea circles

Heterogeneous small groups that support discussion focused on learning about a concept.

Purpose is to have students build an understanding of a concept through the dialogic exchange of facts and information (Guthrie & McCann, 1996).

Goal is to ensure that each student leaves the group with a clearer, more thorough and more accurate understanding of the target concept.

Multiple concept-related texts, at varying levels of reading difficulty, are provided by the teacher.

Each student reads their selected text, either independently or with a partner, for the purpose of gathering information about the topic under discussion.

Students then bring their information to the circle where the information is shared, clarified, extended and debated in order to co-construct a deeper and more elaborate understanding of the concept.

Being able to think deeply, articulate reasoning and listen purposefully increases student engagement. Grand conversations allow students to be leaders in a collaborative process that promotes the discussion of text in a meaningful way. This supports higher-order thinking skills and increases student learning and achievement. Who is doing the thinking and who is doing the talking in your classroom?

As we move through the gradual release of responsibility, it should move from teacher to student!

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So much for my 30 posts in 30 days. Unfortunately, work commitments beat me this week and I am now about five posts behind my goal. My oral language workshop still prevails so tonight's blog will look at Grand Conversations in Primary Classrooms, an article published as a part of the Capacity Building Series.

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By centering student voice, grand conversations give teachers opportunities to deepen students' content knowledge and collaboration skills.

"Mr. Adam, can I be in the inner circle first?" I hear this sentence from someone every week as students push their desks to create a circle space on the tile floor. They know that they will all get a chance to be in a literature circle, yet for some reason being first matters. But why wouldn't students be enthusiastic to discuss a book?

In my classroom, students discuss literature by having a "grand conversation." Compared with other literature circles, a grand conversation-a familiar approach used in Universal Design for Learning, similar to a Socratic seminar-is a student-led process. While the grand conversation format can be used to unpack any type of content, my upper elementary students know they will use this time to engage with one another about the weekly interactive read-aloud.

What is a Grand Conversation?

At its core, a grand conversation frames how students share their opinions and respond to peers about their thoughts and feelings. While the inner circle is speaking about a book, an outer circle of students takes notes on what is being said, knowing that after the conversation is complete, they will have to provide the inner circle with meaningful feedback before switching roles. Not only does the practice promote speaking skills, but active listening is also central to this format.

A grand conversation is neither a back-and-forth dialogue nor a teacher lecture. In other literature circles, teachers grant specific roles to some of the members; for example, a teacher or student may take on the role of facilitator. In a grand conversation, nobody is a facilitator.

As an instructor, this forces me to live in the moment and to trust that I will know what to say when the time comes for me to share. Grand conversation gurus Ralph Peterson and Maryann Eeds discuss the importance of this collaboration process:"Certainly this is the most difficult and challenging kind of teaching. Teachers must be listeners who avoid domination and act collaboratively."

A Grand Conversation In Action

A low buzz begins to build in the room as my students open their spiral notebooks and look over the notes that they wrote during the prior day's read-aloud. Now that the inner circle is seated, the outer circle forms behind them.

As the classroom settles, I go over the norms that we will use during the grand conversation. Even though students know these grand conversation agreements, we always review them to remind ourselves that this is a respectful conversation.

Quickly, I slide down and sit on the floor in the outside circle. During some literature conversations, teachers choose to sit in the circle with their students to help facilitate the discussion, but I prefer to sit in the outside circle, showing the class that they have control. Sometimes, the best moments happen when we get out of the way. I coach in occasionally, but I mostly allow the discussion to unfold.

For example, during a grand conversation on Peppe the Lamplighter,I felt that the discussion had fizzled out. I decided to coach in and say, "I noticed that you were talking about the role of the secondary character. Maybe you can chat about the author's message." Quickly, the discussion was fueled again. Except for the moments when I coach in, the students have complete command.

Modeling and Scaffolding the Conversation

This kind of freedom requires preparation so that students know how to have a productive conversation. Prior to implementing grand conversations, many of my lessons focus on body language, how to speak respectfully, and even how to disagree.

When they learn these tools, students take risks and move into a student-led conversation. Faye Brownlie, author of Grand Conversations, Thoughtful Responses, discusses the importance of students building independence in literature circles: "Once you feel that the students are able to meet independently, let them fly!"

While some students crave to share their thoughts, there are others that are more reserved. To them, a grand conversation is like a game of racquetball where the ball can bounce off any wall at any time. This style of conversation is different from their usual, everyday banter.

Consistency is the most important aspect of the process in teaching students how to speak in a grand conversation format. While the grand conversation happens weekly in my classroom, there are many opportunities for students to engage in discussion with their peers between these times. Being intentional about modeling and teaching communication skills is important in every curriculum.

Using Grand Conversations to Facilitate Self-Assessment

In true collaboration, we must embrace the messy moments. Grand conversations are no different. Some students are driven to share their thoughts, while other students may have a goal to express themselves more. At the same time, the most enthusiastic speaker in the circle may need to work on active listening skills, meaning that everyone has something to work on.

A positive self-assessment tool invites students to make reflections on their communication process and set meaningful goals for future conversations. And serving as a "guide on the side" allows teachers to facilitate formative assessment through active listening, too.

For example, I once had a student discuss the need to write more reflections in their reader's notebook during the interactive read-aloud. On another occasion, a student set a goal to discuss the author's message. So, in a way, the definition of a "perfect conversation" is left to individual students. Carving out time for regular self-assessment allows students and teachers to track growth across a unit or term, showcasing how communication skills can build across time.

Teachers of all levels create time for students to practice reading, writing, and math skills. We need to be just as intentional about how we create opportunities for students to participate in meaningful conversations.
Interactive read-aloud texts I've used for grand conversations:
Allowing students to take the lead in their learning processes will create a rich, thoughtful curriculum. When we move out of the way, we allow our students to take control and share their critical thinking with us and each other.

One Green Apple, by Eve Bunting: During this conversation, students discussed how speaking a different language can sometimes be a difficult thing to overcome.

Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles: My students had a deep conversation about segregation laws. I loved this conversation, because many students felt inspired to participate.

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, by Jonah Winter: Sandy, the protagonist of this text, made the choice to not play baseball on his religious holidays. My baseball fans had a rich conversation and made many connections to this decision.

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Using the Grand Conversation Model to Discuss Readings

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By centering student voice, grand conversations give teachers opportunities to deepen students' content knowledge and collaboration skills.

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Great Conversations in the Junior Classroom

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Great Conversations in the Junior Classroom

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How to Empower Every Student To Talk in Class and Why It Matters

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How to Empower Every Student To Talk in Class and Why It Matters

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How to Empower Every Student to Talk in Class—and Why It Matters

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By creating welcoming, well-facilitated opportunities for in-class discourse, educators can help level the playing field.

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You've probably heard of-and maybe used-learning stations in your classroom. With stations, teachers set up activities around their rooms, then have students rotate from station to station, performing each task. They are a wonderful way to provide variety and engagement in your classroom.

There's only one real downside to stations-they take a LOT of time to set up. And because we're all short on time, we may not use stations as often as we could.

So today I'm proposing a watered-down version of stations that keeps the movement, interactivity and variety while minimizing the prep work. I'm calling these "Chat Stations," discussion prompts that students visit just like stations, but instead of performing a complex task, they just have a quick discussion. Chat Stations are incredibly flexible: They can be used for test reviews, ethical debates, exploring new material, even analyzing literature.

On top of their flexibility as a cooperative learning tool, Chat Stations can also dramatically improve whole-class discussions. Because students have fully explored each issue in the less-threatening Chat Station setting, they will be better prepared to participate in a larger class discussion next. And as we explored in a previous post, we need to do more to engage our less talkative students. Chat Stations offer another way to get them more involved.

Here's a video demonstrating how Chat Stations work:

The more traditional kinds of stations-where students perform more complex or hands-on work-are still the gold standard for student engagement, but Chat Stations can be a great strategy for those times when you haven't been able to prepare a "real" station. They still get students up and moving and breathe new life into your content. And there's really no limit to how challenging your questions can be.

I'm pretty sure I haven't invented anything new here, so if you're doing something like this and have a tip or suggestion to add, please comment below. If you try this for the first time, please share your experiences with us. ♦

Stay in touch.
Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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Students Sitting Around Too Much? Try Chat Stations.

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Your new favorite teaching strategy: This pared-down version of learning stations keeps the movement, interactivity and variety while minimizing the prep work.

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Sponsored by Teaching Channel and UL Xplorlabs

While hexagonal thinking is not new in the world of business and innovation, it's just making its way into the classroom. It's a method for considering the connections between ideas and finding the nuances in those connections. If you're looking for a fresh framework for discussion and critical thinking, this may be just the thing.

How it Works

When you place an idea on a hexagon, it has six sides where connections could be made to other ideas. When you place many ideas on many hexagons, the discussion about where to connect what will be different every time.

Hexagons for the Vietnam-War era
(click all images for a close-up view)

If you gave the same seven idea cards to seven people, do you think you'd get the same seven webs of interconnected hexagons? Would the people explain the connections in the same way?

Nope.

And really, that's the beauty of hexagonal thinking. It provides a springboard for a totally creative discussion. When you give a small group of students a deck of hexagons and ask them to connect them however they choose, every group will come up with a different web for different reasons. Along the way they'll hopefully question each other and dig deep into the concepts on the cards, arguing about which idea connects more to an important concept and which example deserves one of those precious six sides.

The Step-by-Step

Let's imagine you've got your students in small groups, and each group is staring at a beautiful deck of hexagons.

Now what?

I recommend you kick off this activity for the first time by giving directions something like this:
Once you have your set of hexagons, it's time for your group to begin making connections between them. Your conversations now will be about showing how and why you think the different ideas and options connect. Everyone will see things differently, and that's OK. Just keep talking until you find the connections that stick. As you discuss your ideas, use the text to find supporting evidence for why you think your connections are strong ones. Each hexagon can connect to up to six others. Arrange and rearrange until you feel you have the strongest hexagon web in place that you can. Then begin explaining your connections with connection arrows, writing in why you have created intersections between key hexagons. Everyone in the group will contribute differently, and that's OK. You need to have people listening and moving pieces to create the web, people debating, people asking questions. By the end of your discussion, you should have an interconnected web of concepts along with clearly explained connections. If you're working with paper hexagons, tape or glue them down to another sheet of paper to secure them, or take a photo of your finished web. If you're working digitally, submit your two slides: the finished hexagon web, followed by the slide with your explanations.
There's a lot of room here for students to participate in their own unique ways. For me, part of the point of the activity is for students to see that everyone can take on different roles that matter.

Two Examples

Let's take a look at what this might look like in your classroom. In this case, I'll share digital examples created in Google Slides, since you may well be leading your discussions and small group activities via online channels this year. But paper hexagons are equally wonderful when you can use them.

Example 1: English Language Arts

First let's take a look at a hexagonal thinking discussion for an English class, wrapping up a unit on 1984.

Here's the set-up, with the terms listed in individual (moveable) text boxes.

Now students can discuss the placement of their terms/hexagons. In this case, rather than shifting paper hexagons around, they will go into the Google Slide, then drag and drop their terms across the slide and into the web of hexagons as they decide where to place them.

Now that the students have made their connections as they wish, they need to explain their choices. This can take place in many ways:

Students could record arguments for one or two connections on a tool like Flipgrid,

Students could write down their analysis.

Groups could collaborate to write explanations for several of their connections or present them back to the class.

Take a peek at what the written explanations look like for the web pictured above. In this case, students are sharing five explanations, but you could adjust that to suit your needs. Some connections are always going to be more interesting than others - the ones that generate the most debate, the surprising ones, the ones where three key sections link in one place. Have students write or present about the key connections, rather than about every single one.

Example 2: Science

Now let's take a look at how this might look in a science class. Imagine you're looking back over a unit on global warming, and helping students review the big ideas.

Here's the set-up: For this version, students can move the hexagons as well as the terms, creating any number of different webs. Then they use the connection arrows to point to the intersections they are going to explain in detail.

Student groups discuss the possibilities, dragging the hexagons and terms into place as they go. The final product could look one hundred different ways.

Once they have their web created, they make their explanations.

Creating Your Hexagonal Thinking Decks

You can create decks of hexagons with the terms already inside (let your students help you cut them out!) or print blank hexagon sheets and invite student groups to brainstorm the concepts to put inside before their discussion.

No matter how you create them, you want the hexagon decks to be filled with the key ideas of your recent class work, as well as interesting ties across disciplines and to the modern world. Hexagonal thinking makes it easy to cross disciplines and bring relevant modern connections into the discussion.

Let's say you're creating a hexagon deck for Jason Reynolds' book, Long Way Down. You'll fill it with characters, themes and style elements, but also with figures from the news, current political movements, similar books, and background information about the author.

Now imagine you're creating a deck for a unit covering an artistic period. You can put in key terms and artists, but also important authors and political figures of the period, and artists and movements of today that connect back.

As for making the shapes themselves, there are lots of time-saving options, whether you want to use digital hexagons or paper ones.

Digital Hexagons

Get access to your free copy of the digital hexagonal thinking toolkit featured above right here.

Create your own digital hexagons with PowerPoint or Google Slides by following these instructions:

Paper Hexagons

Use this online hexagon generator, created by Pam Hook.

Print and laminate these free rainbow hexagons, then add concepts with dry erase markers for quick discussions.

Print blank sheets of hexagons (you can easily create these in any size using the shapes tool in PowerPoint) to give out to small groups of students, then ask them to generate key terms, ideas, connections to other disciplines, connections to the modern world, etc. on their hexagons and cut them out. Then have groups switch decks so they are discussing a fresh list of ideas.

Create your own hexagon templates with terms you can change up whenever you want to do a hexagonal thinking discussion. Cut them out while watching New Girl on Netflix, or make the first step of the discussion in class to cut out the hexagons while beginning to discuss how they will connect.

A fun addition to any paper deck is a set of connection arrows. Print a few bubble arrows (again, the PowerPoint shapes tool makes it easy) on paper for students to put in at key intersections. Have students fill them in with their explanation of the connection. Sticky notes will also work well.

Wondering how to grade this?

There are a few ways you could grade hexagonal thinking. You could have everyone write a short reflection at the end about their contributions, and grade that. You could use it as a springboard into a writing assignment, asking students to explain and argue for key connections from the discussion, then grade that. You could have students present about a key connection on Flipgrid. Easy.

But I want to suggest a slightly more complex option too. Recently I interviewed Sarah Fine, co-author of In Search of Deeper Learning. One of her findings, after years of study across American high schools, was that we rarely ask students to truly collaborate in our core subjects, so we don't really create a culture of interdependence among them. They don't get to use their individual gifts to contribute to a final product created by the team, although that is often what real-world projects look like. Instead, we favor what she calls "lockstep learning." Everyone must do the same thing, separately.

So maybe for hexagonal thinking, you grade the final group web. And you ask the kids to share about how their different strengths allowed them to contribute to the final product.

Maybe some kids are super brainstormers, coming up with lots of great terms and ideas for what to put on the hexagons. Maybe one or two students in the group are great at lettering and drawing. They could create beautiful visual representations of the terms and ideas. Maybe some students shine at leading discussion. Maybe some are natural at making spatial and visual connections, and can help move the hexagons around as they listen to the group. Maybe some are excellent listeners, and can be taking notes about the connections based on what they hear from others. Maybe some are good mediators, who can help find common ground and calm down heated debates when discussion gets intense.

If you go this route, I really think it's worth discussing in advance what project teams are like in the workplace, and how people contribute in different ways. Then, at the end, you might let kids write a short paragraph about how they contributed based on their own strengths and skills, and whether they were happy with the way the group dynamics turned out.

Variations and Additions

Individuals or Partners

This would certainly work as an individual assignment or a prompt for partners as well. But with a small group, you'll get more perspectives on where to place what, which can be nice. You might consider giving students the option to work alone, with a partner, or in a group.

Adding Visuals

If you and your students are fans of sketchnotes or one-pagers, you can always add a visual layer to your hexagons. Invite students to illustrate their concepts with representative imagery and add quotations from their texts to bring more meaning for each idea into the conversation.

This is certainly not necessary, but adds dimension to the discussion and the eventual display of the concept web.

Hexagonal One-Pagers for Long Way Down

Gallery Walking

Once your students have completed their webs, you can do a gallery walk to see each other's concept webs and check out the connections their peers have made (this can be done online through a collaborative Google slides presentation), or have each group in turn present briefly back to the class about some of their most interesting connection points. The hexagons that caused the most debate will probably be the most fun to share back, and everyone will get to see how others mixed and matched the same hexagons in unique ways.

When you bring hexagonal thinking into your classroom -whether that's online or in person-you bring a fresh spark of energy to discussion. Your students will see things in new ways as they seek to connect wide-ranging ideas. If you're finding it difficult to get kids talking this year as they transition into new scenarios, you're definitely not alone. Hexagonal thinking just might be the tool you're looking for to help your classes over this transition and back into their critical thinking zones.

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Hexagonal Thinking: A Colorful Tool for Discussion

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If you've been looking for a fresh way to get students thinking outside the box, this may be just what you need.

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3 Ways to Guide Early Elementary Students to Talk About Their Learning

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Young students love to talk, but harnessing that enthusiasm for learning requires some structure. Teachers traditionally put a lot of effort into getting kids to be quiet, but primary school children love to talk. We now know the importance of student talk and the impact it can have on their learning-the person who's doing the talking is doing the thinking and learning.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Productive struggle is important for students to retain what they learn.

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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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Discussion and Supporting Materials

Thought starters

1. How does this strategy encourage student-led conversations?

2. What are the benefits of using movement during class discussions?

3. How could this strategy be adapted to other activities?

Teachers

English Language Arts / 10 11 12 / Teacher

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Sarah Brown Wessling uses movement during small group discussion to help students deepen their conversations. Sarah asks only some students in each small group to move with each topic switch, allowing those students to carry the conversation from their previous group to the new group.

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Teaching Channel: Strategies for Student-Centered Discussion

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Teaching Channel: Strategies for Student-Centered Discussion

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ELA.RL.11-12.1

Common core State Standards

ELA: English Language Arts

RL: Reading Standards for Literature 6-12

11-12: 11th & 12th Grades

1:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

|

ELA.SL.11-12.1a

Common core State Standards

ELA: English Language Arts

SL: Speaking and Listening Standards 6-\x80\x9312

11-12: 11th & 12th Grades

1a:
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one on
one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-\x80\x9312 topics,
texts, and issues, building on others'\x80\x99 ideas and expressing their own clearly and
persuasively.

a. Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under
study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts
and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well reasoned
exchange of ideas.

b. Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision making,
set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as
needed.

c. Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe
reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a
topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote
divergent and creative perspectives.

d. Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims,
and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when
possible; and determine what additional information or research is required
to deepen the investigation or complete the task.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

|

ELA.SL.11-12.1c

Common core State Standards

ELA: English Language Arts

SL: Speaking and Listening Standards 6-12

11-12: 11th & 12th Grades

1c:
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one on
one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics,
texts, and issues, building on others'\x80\x99 ideas and expressing their own clearly and
persuasively.

a. Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under
study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts
and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well reasoned
exchange of ideas.

b. Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision making,
set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as
needed.

c. Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe
reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a
topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote
divergent and creative perspectives.

d. Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims,
and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when
possible; and determine what additional information or research is required
to deepen the investigation or complete the task.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

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Discussion and Supporting Materials

Thought starters

1. How does beginning the lesson with student reflection and a guiding question equip students for the discussion?

2. In what ways did Sarah ensure this to be student-centered, student-led?

3. What does it mean for a teacher to prepare for a discussion?

School Details

Johnston Senior High School
6501 Northwest 62nd Avenue
Johnston IA 50131

Data Provided By:

Teachers

English Language Arts / 10 11 12 / Teacher

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High School ELA teacher and 2010 Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling takes on the challenge of engaging students in whole class discussion as they make sense of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find. The lesson begins with establishing the learning goals by having students engage in brief reflection and share their thinking.

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Remembering What's Important about Classroom Talk

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Remembering What's Important about Classroom Talk

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From The Reading Teacher

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ELA.RL.11-12.1

Common core State Standards

ELA: English Language Arts

RL: Reading Standards for Literature 6-12

11-12: 11th & 12th Grades

1:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

|

ELA.SL.11-12.1a

Common core State Standards

ELA: English Language Arts

SL: Speaking and Listening Standards 6-\x80\x9312

11-12: 11th & 12th Grades

1a:
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one on
one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-\x80\x9312 topics,
texts, and issues, building on others'\x80\x99 ideas and expressing their own clearly and
persuasively.

a. Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under
study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts
and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well reasoned
exchange of ideas.

b. Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision making,
set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as
needed.

c. Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe
reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a
topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote
divergent and creative perspectives.

d. Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims,
and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when
possible; and determine what additional information or research is required
to deepen the investigation or complete the task.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

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ELA.SL.11-12.1c

Common core State Standards

ELA: English Language Arts

SL: Speaking and Listening Standards 6-12

11-12: 11th & 12th Grades

1c:
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one on
one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics,
texts, and issues, building on others'\x80\x99 ideas and expressing their own clearly and
persuasively.

a. Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under
study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts
and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well reasoned
exchange of ideas.

b. Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision making,
set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as
needed.

c. Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe
reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a
topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote
divergent and creative perspectives.

d. Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims,
and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when
possible; and determine what additional information or research is required
to deepen the investigation or complete the task.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

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Discussion and Supporting Materials

Thought starters

1. In what ways do the mini-lesson and prep time provide for a successful discussion?

2. How does the role-playing support more rigorous discussion and encourage students to take risks?

3. Why are Ms. Wessling's tally marks an important part of the discussion?

School Details

Johnston Senior High School
6501 Northwest 62nd Avenue
Johnston IA 50131

Data Provided By:

Teachers

English Language Arts / 10 11 12 / Teacher

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Pinwheel Discussions: Texts in Conversation

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Sarah Brown Wessling facilitates rigorous discussion in her AP English Literature classroom through a "Pinwheel Discussion" that requires a group of four students to take on the persona and character of three authors and a provocateur before engaging in a coffee house style debate/discussion.

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WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES DISCUSSION MAKE ON GRADES?

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WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES DISCUSSION MAKE ON GRADES?

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Check out what we learn from the NAEP scores

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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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One teacher's insights

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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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Moving beyond teacher generated questions

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Is there REALLY  a secret to having meaningful class discussions?

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Is there REALLY  a secret to having meaningful class discussions?

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By In Laura Robb Education Topics

Try These 5 Techniques that Ensure Students Do the Talking
We all know the statistics and, well, we talk right over them! Teachers do far too much talking in the course of the day, and students do far too little. I don't say that to teacher-bash, but rather as a way to invite you to hit the pause button on over explaining and over guiding, and try these techniques that lead to student-driven, amazing discussions about the content you teach.

1. Model the mindsets. You gotta be all-in! Fully commit to the goal of your students controlling the learning conversations. Talk about and co-construct charts of the characteristics of productive dialogue. The key characteristic? Active listening, which means students concentrate on what the speaker is saying and push aside distracting thoughts. Active listeners learn to respect theories and conclusions that differ from theirs-as long as the text provides adequate support for the assertions.

2. Remember, old habits die hard. Raising hands doesn't cut it during student-led conversations, so you'll have to wean students off of that tradition. Instead, students talk, one at a time, while peers listen and process ideas. Once a student finishes, a peer jumps into the conversation. Tempted to rescue the conversation? Hold your breath, count to 10, trust your students. With practice in whole group, small group and partner discussions, your students will thrive in a month or two.

3. Guiding Equip students with an arsenal of question types. Model what it means to arrive at a guiding question, and then coach students to develop their own. For example, fourth graders were investigating self-selected books on natural disasters. Students agreed on this guiding question: questions are those that can go broad and go deep, and align with students' authentic curiosities about an issue. How do natural disasters affect people's lives? Even though each student read a different book, the guiding question was broad enough to stimulate rich conversations. Interpretive questions are also open-ended and have more than one answer. Have students consider verbs that will help them pose interpretive questions: analyze, examine, compare and contrast, evaluate, show, classify, I hand out lists of prompts to keep discussion flowing to each student, so they have this concrete support at first.

4. During discussions, especially as students are just getting the hang of purposeful dialogue, listen from the sidelines and every once in a while, and only when absolutely necessary, pose a clarifying question-one that nudges students to get back on course or go deeper in some way. For example, maybe the question gets a student to say more, define a term, go back to the text, or think about whether he or she still believes his position. Author Find your new niche. Renee Houser reminds us that a lot of this nudging can be done without our even talking! Think about non-verbal gestures and facial expressions that might work.

5. Be a social engineer. One of the many benefits of student-led discussions is that they allow you to listen and look at your students in new ways. Ask such questions as: Who is doing most of the talking? Which kids are obsessed with the same authors or topics? Who is particularly adept at active listening or posing questions? Which students have natural rapport? Who might I pair that may be in different groups of friends, but I now see will be great talk partners?

Laura Robb is a renowned literacy author, whose most recent book is Read, Talk, Write: 35 Lessons That Teach Students to Analyze Fiction and Nonfiction.

About the Author

Author, teacher, coach, and speaker, Laura Robb has completed 43 years of teaching in grades 4-8. She presently coaches teachers in reading and writing workshops at Powhatan School in Virginia. She also coaches teachers in grades K-10 in Staunton, VA, Amherst, VA, Lebanon, OH, and Long Island, NY. Each year Robb returns to the classroom for several weeks. She has written more than 18 books for teachers - her most recent Scholastic titles are a second edition of her best selling book, Teaching Reading in Middle School and a short, focused book for content teachers, Reading Strategy Lessons for Science & Social Studies. Her three books on differentiating reading instruction-Differentiating Reading Instruction, Assessments for Differentiating Reading instruction, and her 476 page binder, Teaching Reading: A Differentiated Approach for Grades 4 and Up, support teachers as they try to meet the needs of diverse levels of readers. In addition, Robb has written a big book for teaching reading strategies, Teaching Reading With Think Aloud Lessons, a book on teaching expository writing, Teaching Nonfiction Writing, and a best selling book on content reading, Teaching Reading in Social Studies, Science, and Math.

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The Robb Review: THE SECRET TO Meaningful Discussions?

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THE SECRET TO Meaningful Discussions. Teachers do far too much talking in the course of the day, and students do far too little.

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Let me start by acknowledging the following : We all work hard.

Day in, day out, passionately, for hours outside the classroom, over breaks, through the night, in the summer, at the expense of our own health, sanity, and in some cases children, tirelessly, endlessly, hard.

We wrestle with accountability, making the right choices, bankrupting our personal finances, moving in new directions, providing substantive feedback, reinventing our curriculum, and capturing that often elusive "I'm making a difference" feeling.

And all of these opportunities, obstacles, maneuvers, struggles, negotiations, blessings...are well worth the effort. We know this to be true.

We grow. Students grow. The world brightens.

This week, however, a week of extra meetings, assigned readings, professional development planning, ACT Interim test data analysis, sophomore research papers and practice AP tests in all of my classes, has me feeling cranky, irritable, and disenchanted with the whole thing (and apparently listy, because I've got a lot of lists rolling here).

But it's not all of these "bonuses" to my week that really have me in a funk.

It's the quiet.
The file in and file out of my classroom.
The silence of compliance.

My students have not been talking the past few class periods, and the absence of their ideas has me crankdified.

While it might seem nice to have a "break" to work while kids complete practice tests and independent study, it didn't feel nice. It felt...empty.

It hit me last week during a discussion of Scott Brown's "Facebook Friendonomics."

We're in a unit on community in AP Language and wrestling with the following:

What is the individual's responsibility to the community?

I had just read the piece aloud, asked students to respond to it in a quick write, and was now listening to a discussion on the author's use of allusion. Brown suggests that the natural evolution of friendships is corrupted by social media.

The discussion was not initially brilliant. Students wrestled with some examples of allusion that meant nothing to them (the author details contacts in a Rolodex, quips about watching 90210, and references Garbage Pail Kids), so I suggested we try to update references, eliciting an enthusiastic walk (dance) down memory lane for my seventeen year olds, back to Pokemon cards and "Soulja Boy" (Ahhhh...2007).

As I listened to them reminisce about cultural touchstones in their lives, I had to smile.

"So, what is this author trying to tell us about community?" I asked.

Our discussion continued for another few minutes, encompassing author craft, the existence of Finsta (I am suddenly SO old), the unnatural qualities of social media "friends," and the duality of both fake and fulfilling relationships through online communities. I sent my students back to their notebooks and they reflected a bit further on how discussion had expanded their understanding of the ways this piece answered our essential question.

And I...was happy.

I had listened, mostly. Invited a few students into the discussion who hadn't shared. Pulled us back to the task at hand.

But I had let them talk. No agenda. No time limit. No right answers.

Now, I'm not here to suggest that having a discussion with your class is revolutionary. Obviously it's not, but it occurred to me:

My individual responsibility to this community is to keep my students talking.

And while I'm on this soapbox (it's not my preferred method of communication, thankfully, but I sort of like it up here), I'll say it another way:

We need to listen. More.

Educators the world over, both seasoned and virginal, know, but all too often forget (so guilty myself), that the talk in our classrooms that is most vital to engagement, progression, retention, and overall enthusiasm for learning, is not our own.

Facilitated and guided by the teacher - yes.
Framed by objectives, teaching points, and standards - of course.
Aimed at gradual release - ideally.
Supplemented with our insights, passions, and ideas - I certainly hope so.

Talk to their small groups, talk to the class, talk to me, talk to their notebooks, talk about talk. It's all talk that can promote discovery.

We need students talking, not just to check comprehension (flashback to the initiate, respond, evaluate cycle of classrooms I grew up in), but far more importantly, to develop their thinking.

My modeling and guided instruction is far more beneficial in the long run, as the goal of each is to get students involved in a way that has them taking the torch and forging ahead on their own.

That's where the emptiness of this past week had come from. We weren't involved in anything together, and I felt the absence of the interaction keenly.

With the testing behind us and the research papers waiting patiently for another hour (or seven hours, if my calculation for that stack is correct), I conferred with several students during reading time, to selfishly feel better myself. During our quick write, I sat down at a table with my kids and wrote, as opposed to staying at my desk. I started several writing conferences during workshop time with, "Tell me about..."

I'm not in any sort of denial that what I've written here is new or different in any way, but I am certain that the reminder did me good. I hope it does for you too.
Let's talk about talk in the comments below. I'm a good listener. Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of English educating gods and goddesses at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. She loves to listen to the Decemberists, the call of redwing blackbirds, and audiobooks read with British accents. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum

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Let me start by acknowledging the following : We all work hard. Day in, day out, passionately, for hours outside the classroom, over breaks, through the night, in the summer, at the expense of our own health, sanity, and in some cases children, tirelessly, endlessly, hard.

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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?

_________
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.

_________
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.

_________
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?

_________
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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Today was the sixth day of school. It has been a whirlwind of reading habits, book shopping, learning how to email, and today; how to actually have a decent discussion. This may seem really simple but year after year I find that many students lack confidence when it comes to discussions, even when previous teachers have had them engaged in their classes. So this year rather than just try to teach them throughout the year, we decided to create a foundation for it now, so what did we do? We combined a few tried-and-true strategies.
We fishbowled to start with.
I invited four volunteers to come up and discuss an unknown text with me. I had to follow the same expectations as them. For the first few classes we did a poem with mixed results, for the final three we did an op-ed piece on why tweens should not have cell phones with better results.
So what was the set up?

Everyone gets a copy of the text, one classroom set, so they do not have to share.

Everyone gets two cards or two of something else.

Groups either sat at whiteboard tables (tables covered in whiteboard contact paper - they are brilliant) or had a two-dollar whiteboard (take a shower panel and get it cut down into six pieces, they cost $2 a piece, I have twelve of them for collaboration).

Everyone gets a "Bounce card."

Everyone gets an expo marker.

Expo marker and whiteboard: After the text has been read (typically by themselves not out loud so make the text accessible for all. This is not a reading strategy lesson per say but rather a discussion lesson), every child should take a few moments to write down their reactions or questions before the discussion starts. That way everyone has a moment to think before the conversation ensues.

Two cards: We used the tried-and-true way to get everyone to speak. When a person speaks, they put their card into the middle. They cannot speak again then until everyone else has also spoken and put a card in the middle. This is to help everyone actually add their voice. I do two cards so that they all have to participate at least twice. After the cards are used up, they can speak as much as they would like.

Bounce card: Again, not my idea but from the book Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner via our awesome 8th grade team. The Bounce card is a visual tool for kids to remember to "bounce" off each other's ideas rather than just state their own opinions. There are three different paths they can take, they can bounce, sum up, or inquire. Having the card in front of them is a helpful reminder to how they should be discussing. Here is what our cards look like.

Teacher role: Coaching, not teaching after the fishbowl. Our job is not to lad the conversation but to let the kids figure it out.

After the fishbowl, it was their turn. I numbered students off so they would be in mixed groups and let them loose, all supplies were already set up for them.

I did not give them any questions to discuss because I want them to start thinking about their own reactions to text. My students wanted me to but I did not, at some point they have to start generating their own questions so why not start today?

We kept this trial run short, around 15 minutes to make sure they stayed on track. It worked pretty well. As I walked around I loved seeing how engaged the kids were, how they were trying to help each other out and add their voice, and how they asked for people to "bounce off" of their ideas.

At the end of the class, I asked them to please reflect on themselves. We spoke about how often we reflect on how others do in a task but forget to look inward and that we are the ones we need to be concerned with, not how others do.

On Monday, our follow-up lesson will be six different tables set up with three different types of topics. Two tables are set up with wordless picture books (Unspoken by Henry Cole and Bluebird by Bob Staake), two are set up with op-ed pieces (why kids should have homework and why schools should have uniforms), and finally two tables will have poems (Langston Hughes I, Too and The Abandoned Farmhouse by Ted Kooser). Students will pick which table they would like to be at but then have to select the other two formats the two next days. Therefore all students will get to try discussing all three types of formats. I am excited to see how this foundational skill will play out this year.
I am currently working on a new literacy book. While the task is daunting and intimidating, it is incredible to once again get to share the phenomenal words of my students as they push me to be a better teacher. The book, which I am still writing, is tentatively Passionate Readers and will be published in the summer of 2017 by Routledge. So until then if you like what you read here, consider reading my book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

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Today was the sixth day of school. It has been a whirlwind of reading habits, book shopping, learning how to email, and today; how to actually have a decent discussion. This may seem really simple but year after year I find that many students lack confidence when it comes to discussions, even when previous teachers...

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Establish Group Agreements

Deciding on group norms, or agreements, right from the get-go will give each student a voice and provide accountability for all. Although Thinking Collaborative's " Seven Norms of Collaboration " (pdf) are designed to be used with adult groups, you can use them to inspire age-appropriate norms. Children (depending on the age) might come up with things like "one person talks at a time," "respect each other and all ideas," and "no put downs." A poster of the shared agreements can be displayed and when necessary, called attention to when a student or group needs a reminder.

Accountability is an important factor in group working agreements. Since a teacher must find creative and effective ways to monitor multiple groups working at once in the classroom, assigning roles can be incredibly helpful. For example, if students are working in groups of four reading and analyzing a news article, you may ask each group to pick an investigator, a recorder, a discussion director, and a reporter. For the group to be successful, each child must complete the tasks that accompany his/her role.

Teach Them How to Listen

Good listeners are valued but rare in our culture. I share this with students. I also tell them that people who really listen-make eye contact, offer empathy, refrain from cutting others off-are easy to like and respect.

Save the Last Word for Me is a great activity that allows students to practice listening. Provide several rounds of this structured activity, followed by time for students to reflect on the experience and evaluate their own listening skills.

Children also need opportunities to restrain themselves from speaking in order to keep their attention on listening. Consider adding "Three, Then Me" to the class norms. This simply means that before one can speak again, they need to wait for three others to share first.

Teach Them the Art of Asking Good Questions

Have the class generate questions on any given topic, writing each one on the board. Decide on the most pressing and interesting questions of the bunch and discuss with students what makes those particular ones stand out. Talk about the types of questions that more often yield the best responses-those that are open-ended, thoughtful, and sometimes even daring.

Explain that well-received questions are neutral and don't make the respondent feel like they're being interrogated. Introduce students to invitational question stems such as, "When you think about ______, what comes to mind?" and, "Considering what we already know about ______, how will we ____?" As a scaffold, provide a handout with question starters for students to use during group discussions.

Students also need to know about wait time. Explain-better yet, demonstrate-that once someone in the group poses a question, a few seconds of silence are necessary, giving everyone time to think.

Teach Them How to Negotiate

A group member who speaks the loudest and most frequently may get the most said, but that doesn't mean they'll convince a group of anything. A good negotiator listens well, shows patience and flexibility, points out shared ideas and areas of group agreement, and thinks under pressure.

After sharing this list with students, generate together more characteristics to add to it. Indulge them in a brief activity called "Build a Consensus." In this activity, set the timer and give mere minutes to group plan a mock birthday party, a field trip, or a group meal so they can practice their negotiation skills. Now that they've been introduced to this skill, rehearsing it in a low-stakes, engaging way, they can next go more deeply into consensus decision making using a central text.

Model What We Expect

When it comes to creating a highly collaborative classroom, teachers need to frequently model listening, paraphrasing, artful questioning, and negotiating. In a student-centered classroom, there's less direct instruction. What we find ourselves doing most often is facilitating learning experiences for the whole class and smaller groups. The ability to effectively facilitate a group is a 21st-century skill crucial to success in the university and the work world.

This reminds me of the design company IDEO. An employee there was promoted to guide a team in redesigning the shopping cart not because of seniority but because "he's good with groups."

Group Brain Power

Learning, and higher-level learning such as synthesizing information from several documents or analyzing scientific data, can hit much deeper when done collaboratively. Lev Vygotsky's seminal work asserted that social interaction is a fundamental aspect of learning. And if he were alive today, he would most likely agree with the saying "two minds are better than one." He might add, "Better yet, how about three or four?"

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Deeper Learning: A Collaborative Classroom Is Key | Edutopia

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Deciding on group norms, or agreements, right from the get-go will give each student a voice and provide accountability for all. Although Thinking Collaborative's " Seven Norms of Collaboration " (pdf) are designed to be used with adult groups, you can use them to inspire age-appropriate norms. Children (depending on the age) might come up with things like "one person talks at a time," "respect each other and all ideas," and "no put downs."

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New Bloom's Taxonomy Question Stems for al 6 Levels

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Includes discussion of instructional routines such as reciprocal teaching.

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A great strategy from AVID

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ASCD Ed Brief: 2 rules for dynamic conversations

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ASCD Ed Brief: 2 rules for dynamic conversations

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From Institute for Learning

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This video takes you into a middle school science classroom who teaches in a high poverty school. Watch as he builds community, gives students a juicy task that requires talk, and funky instructional moves that demand talk.

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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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Tips, strategies, ideas to use tomorrow

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Practice Brief 6 -- Topics:InformalEd Instruction Equity
How Can I Get My Students to Learn Science by Productively Talking with Each Other?

Teachers should routinely support students in "sense-making" talk to help them work through their understanding while engaging in the science and engineering practices.

District staff and PD providers should provide models of productive talk in PD and as an integral part of enacting curriculum materials.

School leaders should observe productive science talk in classrooms and provide support to teachers as they develop talk facilitation skills.

What is the Issue?

Talking is integral to human learning. The science and engineering practices described in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education highlight that scientists and engineers routinely communicate through talk-not merely to share their final form products-but to make sense of their work and to gather feedback and refine their ideas as the work unfolds. Learners benefit from such accountable talk as well, but it can be tricky to scaffold and manage productive discourse in the classroom.

Authors:

RICH BACOLOR, TAMMY COOK-ENDRES, TIFFANY LEE & ANNIE ALLEN

Reflection Questions

What do you think productive classroom talk looks like? What is your role in supporting that talk at different phases of student investigations?

What explicit and implicit social norms are at play in your classroom, and how can you effectively shift these to support productive talk?

What cultural styles of talk and sensemaking are present in your community of students that you should make room for in science learning conversations?

Things to Consider

The science and engineering practices in the NRC Framework are deeply social and require that students communicate. They involve reasoning with others and seeking a shared understanding of science phenomena. The goals of productive talk include: (1) sharing and clarifying one's own thinking, (2) listening to one another, (3) deepening one's own reasoning, and (4) thinking together.

Talk makes student thinking explicit and public-so that it can be engaged with, interpreted, built upon, and refined. Student ideas can then become resources for learning.

I-R-E (initiation, response, evaluation) is the dominant discourse pattern of classroom interactions, and it needs to change. In order to engage students in science and engineering practices, they need access to and experience with discourse-rich sensemaking conversations. Breaking the I-R-E pattern and integrating productive talk may require practice, preteaching, and scripting student roles and language. (STEM Teaching Tools #35 and #48 may be helpful.)

Students should be supported to make sense of complex natural phenomena. Rich discourse among students should be encouraged through thoughtful lesson sequences and skilled facilitation that position them as collaborative constructors of knowledge.

"In order to process, make sense of, and learn from their ideas, observations, and experiences, students must talk about them... Talk forces students to think about and articulate their ideas. Talk can also provide an impetus for students to reflect on what they do-and do not-understand."

- Ready, Set, SCIENCE!

"We suggest that trying to present science [communication] in a culturally neutral way is like trying to paint a picture without taking a perspective."

- Doug Medin, psychologist

Attending to Equity

Recommended Actions You Can Take

Routinely focus instruction on student talk related to making sense of phenomena and their ideas. Read about making thinking visible through talk and argument, including how to establish classroom norms and use talk moves to cultivate learning conversations. Review the Talk Science Primer and use the Talk Move Checklist.

These classroom videos and supporting discourse primer highlight the use of different talk moves. Learn more about different approaches to managing classroom talk.

ALSO SEE STEM TEACHING TOOLS

STEM Teaching Tools content copyright 2014-19 UW Institute for Science + Math Education. All rights reserved.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Research + Practice Collaboratory (Award #1238253). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

Work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License. Others may adapt with attribution. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

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How Can I Get My Students to Learn Science by Productively Talking with Each Other? : StemTeachingTools (en-US)

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Practice Brief 6 -- Topics:InformalEd Instruction Equity Teachers should routinely support students in "sense-making" talk to help them work through their understanding while engaging in the science and engineering practices. District staff and PD providers should provide models of productive talk in PD and as an integral part of enacting curriculum materials.

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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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Fisher, Frey, Rothenberg on Conversations

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Fisher, Frey, Rothenberg on Conversations

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Even though this focuses on English Language Learners, the tips are applicable to all situations.

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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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From the National Council of Teachers of Math