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Using sentence stems to scaffold classroom discussions guides students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others' ideas.

I used to think that the perfect classroom had students sitting in rows, hands folded, with their eyes on me. "All eyes on me" was in fact my favorite teacher line. Having an attentive audience was one of the reasons teaching was fun for me.

Fast-forward 35 years to my last year of teaching before I transitioned to being an instructional coach-my students were at tables or sitting knee-to-knee in small groups. They weren't quiet, and they were facilitating their own learning. The chatter was rigorous and the ideas were flowing. How did we get there? I taught my fifth-grade students talk moves -sentence stems and key phrases that help students speak, actively listen, and build on each other's ideas.

Introducing the Talk Moves

I presented the talk moves over four days. After I introduced each talk move, we practiced what it would sound like in our classroom. For example, when students wanted to expand their peer's thinking, that sounded like "What do you mean by that?" or "Can you give an example?"

On the fourth day, after students had learned the talk moves, a group of four students modeled them. The rest of the class observed and then gave the group feedback by naming the talk moves they saw their peers use.

I kept a bulletin board in the classroom with the talk moves up all year long. This gave my students key phrases to activate their talking, thinking, and listening-like "I respectfully disagree because ___." Building the routines takes time, but in the long run it saves time by engaging students and making the time much more productive. As the school year progressed, we would sometimes need to revisit the talk moves to reflect on how the talk looked-students sitting facing each other, in a circle or knee-to-knee-and what it sounded like when it was working well. The bulletin board was used as a reference guide most every hour of our day.

The Talk Moves

Time to think: When I introduced this to students, we quickly discussed why it's important to allow each other time to think-having that think time helps students articulate their thoughts. To practice this talk move, I gave students time to jot down a few ideas before they started talking, and during conversations they could say, "I need time to think." Allowing for quiet moments and thought to become routine will encourage think time to happen as students later work in small groups or with a partner. I also brought to students' attention when I used this move as a teacher. I'd say, "Notice, I just used think time."

Say more: Too many times people talk and don't listen. This talk move gets students listening as they ask their classmates for clarification. Having students ask questions like "Can you say more about that?" "What do you mean by that?" or "Can you give an example?" encourages active listening and back-and-forth discussion between students.

So, are you saying ___? Summarizing helps students check their understanding and verify with speakers that they communicated what they intended to. Some helpful sentence stems: "Let me see if I understand what you are saying: ___" and "Are you saying ___?"

Who can repeat or rephrase that? Students have to listen carefully if they are going to repeat what someone else said. Having students ask each other, "How can we say that differently?" or "Can you put that in your own words?" also deepens content understanding.

What is your evidence or reasoning? As students explain their thought process, they deepen their own thinking as well as their classmates'. In all subjects, students should be making claims and backing them up with evidence. They can ask each other questions like "What is your evidence?" "Why do you think that?" "Is there anything in the text that makes you think that?" and "Where did you get that information?"

Challenge or counterexample: When students are introduced to a conflicting example, it pushes their thinking and deepens their understanding. They can gently challenge each other's thinking by asking questions like "Does it always work that way?" "How does that idea work with a different example?" and "What if it had been ___ instead?"

Agree and disagree: Conflict isn't always easy, but it's important for students to learn how to respectfully express their opinions and know that it's OK to change their mind when they are introduced to new information. These sentence stems can help facilitate constructive communication: "I respectfully disagree because ___," "I agree with ___," and "Are you saying the same thing as ___?"

Add on: Sentence stems like "I would like to add on to that," "Adding on to what [another student] said, ___," and "Can I push that idea a bit further?" helps students work together to build upon their prior knowledge.

Explain what someone else means: Having students put their peers' responses into their own words gives more students ownership over the answer, exposes them to different ways about thinking about the answer, and allows you to check for understanding. You can get this talk move started by asking, "Why do you think he said that?" and students can initiate it by saying, "I can explain what ___ means by that" or "I can put that into my own words."

Teaching students to talk productively in the classroom is the most important change I've made in my teaching career. I've used talk moves with students in all areas of the curriculum. As an instructional coach, I find that teachers benefit from using talk moves in professional development, too. We all need to talk, process, and share to be truly learning.

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What Productive Talk Looks Like in the Elementary Grades

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Using sentence stems to scaffold classroom discussions guides students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others' ideas.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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PaperSlides - One Take Group Videos to Communicate a Learning

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PaperSlides - One Take Group Videos to Communicate a Learning

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Evolved Paperslide Videos - Dr. Lodge McCammon

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How we'll fight the next deadly virus... communication and collaboration

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How we'll fight the next deadly virus... communication and collaboration

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Pardis Sabeti: How we'll fight the next deadly virus

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When Ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus's genome, learning how it mutated and spread. Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around the world could join in the urgent fight.

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Why Communication Is Today's Most Important Skill

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Why Communication Is Today's Most Important Skill

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When I was in high school, a man came to speak about Winston Churchill. Mostly, it was the usual mix of historical events and anecdotes, which in Churchill's case was a potent mixture of the poignant, the irreverent and the hilarious. But what I remember best was how the talk ended.

The speaker concluded by saying that if we were to remember one thing about Churchill it should be that what made him so effective was his power to communicate. I didn't understand that at the time. Growing up I had always heard about the importance of hard work, honesty and other things, but never communication.

Yet now, thirty years later, I've begun to understand what he meant. As Walter Isaacson argues in his book The Innovators, even in technology-maybe especially in technology-the ability to collaborate effectively is decisive. In order to innovate, it's not enough to just come up with big ideas, you also need to work hard to communicate them clearly.

The Father Of The Electronic Age

Today, we take electricity for granted. We switch on lights, watch TV and enjoy connected devices without a second thought. It's hard to imagine an earlier age in which we had to use smoky, smelly candles in order to see at night and didn't have the benefit and convenience of basic household appliances.

Michael Faraday, probably more than anyone else, transformed electricity from an interesting curiosity into the workhorse of the modern age. Not only did he uncover many of its basic principles, such as its relationship to magnetism, but also invented crucial technologies, like the dynamo that generates electricity and the motor which turns it into meaningful work.

Yet Faraday was more than just a talented scientist. He was also a very effective communicator. As Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon write in their book, Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, "His scientific genius lay not simply in producing experimental results that had eluded everyone else but in explaining them too."

This wasn't a natural talent, he worked hard at it, taking copious notes on his own lectures and those of others. The effort paid off. His regular lectures at the Royal Institution made him, and the Institution itself, a fixture in the scientific world. The special Christmas lectures for children, which he instituted, continue to this day and draw a large television audience.

The Magician Who Shared His Tricks

A more recent genius was Richard Feynman. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, but also made important discoveries in biology and was an early pioneer of parallel and quantum computing. His talent, in fact, was so prodigious that even other elite scientists considered him to be a magician.

Yet like Faraday, Feynman was not content to hide his tricks behind smoke and mirrors. He insisted on teaching an introductory class for undergraduates-exceedingly rare for top calibre academics-that was standing room only. With his Brooklyn accent, wry sense of humor and talent for explaining things in practical, everyday terms, he was a student favorite.

Perhaps the best example of how Feynman combined brilliance with exceptional communication skills was a talk he gave a few days after Christmas in 1959. Starting from a basic question about what it would take to shrink the Encyclopedia Britannica to fit on the head of a pin, he moved step by step until, in less than an hour, he had invented the field of nanotechnology.

Schopenhauer once said that, "talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." What made Feynman so special was that he wanted us to see it too.

We often treat communication as if it were a discrete act, a matter of performance or lack thereof. Yet meaning cannot be separated from context. A crucial, but often overlooked, function of leadership is creating a culture in which effective communication can flourish.

Consider the case of Google, which I described in Harvard Business Review. In early 2002, Larry Page walked into the the kitchen and posted a few pages of search results and wrote in big, bold letters, "THESE ADS SUCK." In many organizations, this act would be considered a harsh taking down of an incompetent product manager.

But not at Google. It was seen as a call to action and within 72 hours a team of search engineers posted a solution. As it turned out, it was they, not the ads team, that had the requisite skills and perspectives to fix the problem. In many ways, it was that episode that made Google the profit machine it is today.

Yet Page's action was vastly greater than a single act. He and Sergey Brin spent years creating a culture that favored change over the status quo. When he posted the subpar search results, everybody knew why. He wasn't looking to attack-no one was fired or disciplined-but inspire.

Communication is bidirectional, requiring both a transmitter and a receiver. Both need to effectively engineered.

The Myth Of A Private Language

We tend to treat knowledge and communication as two separate spheres. We act as expertise was a private matter, attained through quiet study of the lexicon in a particular field. Communication, on the other hand, is often relegated to the realm of the social, a tool we use to interact with others of our species.

Yet, as Wittgenstein argued decades ago, that position is logically untenable because it assumes that we are able to communicate to ourselves in a private language. In truth, we can't really know anything that we can't communicate. To assert that we can possess knowledge, but are unable to designate what it is, is nonsensical.

And so it is curious that we give communication such short shrift. Schools don't teach communication. They teach math, (not very well), some science, history and give rote instructions about rigid grammatical rules, but give very little guidance on how to express ideas clearly.

When we enter professional life, we immerse ourselves in the jargon and principles of our chosen field and obediently follow precepts laid out by our respective priesthoods. Yet we rarely put serious effort toward expressing ourselves in a language that can be understood by those outside our tribe. Then we wonder why our efforts and achievements fail to resonate.

It has become fashionable to say that our present epoch is an information age, but that's not quite right. In truth, we live in a communication age and it's time we start taking it seriously.

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Why Communication Is Today's Most Important Skill

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When I was in high school, a man came to speak about Winston Churchill. Mostly, it was the usual mix of historical events and anecdotes, which in Churchill's case was a potent mixture of the poignant, the irreverent and the hilarious. But what I remember best was how the talk ended.

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Encouraging Academic Conversations With Talk Moves

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Encouraging Academic Conversations With Talk Moves

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Teachers at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, make these sentence starters easily accessible by taping a talk moves printout to students' desks. King Middle School developed these talk moves inspired by Classroom Discussions: Using Math Talk to Help Students Learn, Grades 1-6, Second Edition, written by Suzanne H. Chapin, Catherine O'Connor, and Nancy Canavan Anderson (Math Solutions, 2009).

This video is part of our How Learning Happens series, which explores teaching practices grounded in the science of learning and human development.

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Encouraging Academic Conversations With Talk Moves

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Sentence starters that students use to join a class discussion encourage both academic thinking and social connectedness.

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Teaching Communication Skills in the Classroom

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Teaching Communication Skills in the Classroom

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A framework for exploring with students what good communication looks like and for helping them develop the necessary skills.

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G Suite has revolutionized education. With its highly collaborative, online/offline format - and its attractive price tag (free!) it provides students and teachers with effective tools for a blended learning environment.

The way that G Suite is interactive and easy to share is powerful. My students can share ideas in real time with other students around the world, an option that never existed before.

There's so much you can do with these apps in class to get students - AND teachers - working together.

Here are 30 collaborative G Suite apps activities that you can use in your own classroom.

DOCS

1. Shared notes. Students often have lots of information to share with each other when they work together as a group. By sharing a document with group members, they can all add ideas and resources - and see everyone's changes in real time.

A table of contents can make a large document more manageable. It can also help collaborators find their area on the page quickly and easily.

Admin application: A document like this can let everyone on staff share info/notes/etc. without having everyone digitally step on each other's toes as they modify the document. Teachers can use this in committee work and at staff meetings.

2. Rethinking rough drafts. With the comments feature in Documents (and other Google Apps), rough drafts aren't a paper students submit to a teacher. They're a process. Teachers can guide students throughout the entire writing assignment so there are no surprises when it's time to turn work in.

3. " Add and pass" activity in docs. Have you ever played a game where someone begins a story then the next person adds to it, the next adds a little more and so on? This is a digital version of that. Begin with an image at the top of a blank document (perhaps a picture of a spooky house, a historical figure, a scene from a story or anything you want!). Share the document with a group of students. Number students off. Student 1 writes the first part of the story. Student 2 begins where they left off adding to the story but giving it their own spin. This continues until you have a completed story. You can give students a certain number of words or sentences they need to add or just let them go.

SLIDES

4. Shared presentations. Create a presentation with one slide per student and give students permission to edit it. Then assign an activity - some quick Internet research, a writing prompt, an image search to find an example, etc. When they're done, show the presentation on a projector. It's student work instantly on display. Want some more guidance? Check out my post on student collaboration in shared Google Slides for step-by-step instructions and ideas for using them in class!

5. Virtual art gallery. This goes for any creative student work - poetry, video, visual art, etc. Display the work in a presentation via text, image or video. Share the presentation with permission for anyone to add comments, or embed a live version of the presentation in a website for others to see.

Kick this assignment up a notch with a Google Earth and Slides appsmash! Google Earth is a visually stunning experience, giving users a first-person view of life from places around the globe. Google Earth is great for giving virtual tours, but there's a simpler and faster version of it. Take screenshots of scenes from Google Earth and paste them in a Google Slides presentation. Add a title and/or some text description. With lots of slides, a virtual tour can happen quickly and meaningfully.

6. Collaborative "Caption This" activity When you add a speech bubble or thought bubble to an image, you let students speak or think for the subject of the photo. Understanding different viewpoints is also a great way to delve deeply into a topic. When students can take the place of the person in the image, it helps them see what's happening in a whole new light. When students work together in groups, the conversations around what the characters should be saying brings the " Caption This " activity to a whole new level.

Select a set of pictures that either introduces your current lesson focus or is key to your subject for the lesson and let students caption them as a group. You can add the images to a Google Slides presentation and share the same set of images with each group of students through Google Classroom. OR, you can have students create a new Google Slides presentation share it one another and add the images themselves.

Add a thought bubble or speech bubble to each of the pictures. Give students a prompt for filling in the bubble, or give them freedom!

When they're done, have students turn the image into you via Google Classroom (or however you collect digital work) and share each group's presentations with the class. Have groups share why they chose their captions, how it differs from other groups, and how they came up with it as a group.

7. Create a class yearbook. This idea comes from Jennifer Scott, an English teacher, and technology leader in California. Rather than pay companies for high-priced software, students use Google Slides to create their own Basic Yearbook. Think of Google Slides as a blank canvas waiting for student graphic designers.

To create a unified look, students create with Image templates. These layouts can be duplicated and their images replaced with images shared either with Google Drive or Google Photos via Google Classroom. In the example below, the image templates in the Word Art Yearbook layout are replaced with photos from the #Mex16 Google Innovator Academy. are written to preserve memories.

A layout like this...

...becomes this.

SlidesYearbook.com was born in December 2016 and continues to grow. Easy-to-use directions are available on the website in both English and Spanish. If creating a yearbook from scratch is not an option this year, feel free to use already created . Start with a class yearbook and move to a schoolwide yearbook next year.

8. Digital brain dumps.Use a more brain-friendly way to study! Retrieval is the practice of studying by pulling information from the brain. That's different from traditional studying methods, like re-reading chapters and reviewing notes. Retrieval can be done with a brain dump, where students write down everything they remember about a topic. A collaborative brain dump lets students do that writing on their own slides within the same slide presentation. Each student gets a slide for his/her own brain dump. Then, as a group, the class can identify what the class knows well and what each student left off of his/her own slide.

SHEETS

9. Quick "do now" activities. Create a spreadsheet and assign each student a row on it. Ask a question to gauge comprehension of a new concept in class. Students type their answer in the shared spreadsheet but don't hit "enter" until you tell them. When they do, it's fast, instant feedback on what they know.

10. Weather/environment lab. Science classes (or any class, really!) can connect with one or more classes in another city, state, province or country and gather data about the weather or environment around them. Log it in a Google Spreadsheet with a page for each location. Compare and contrast the world around you.

11. Sign-up sheets. They're a necessary evil for many activities in schools. By making and sharing a digital place to sign up, you eliminate paper and make your list accessible anywhere. Create a spreadsheet that can be edited by anyone with the link (using the blue "Share" button).

12. Give students their own tab automatically. In a spreadsheet, a tab is a perfect workspace to give each student. It's easy to access each student's work. Every student has virtually unlimited space for working. By using the RosterTab template by Alice Keeler, you can generate personalized tabs for each student. Provide a roster (by typing names or copy/pasting them) and run the script. There are instructions in this blog post.

DRAWINGS

13. Interactive whiteboard. Create a Google Drawing and share it with students, giving them permission to edit. Display the drawing on a projector screen. Students can add text and shapes, draw arrows to important ideas and connect concepts with lines. Everyone can make changes, and anyone can watch - in class or away.

14. Informational graphics. In traditional research reports, students gather information, analyze and organize, and then present their findings in essay style. They could demonstrate all of those findings in another way - with an informational graphic! Infographics are all over social media and are very popular. Learning to create an infographic is a useable skill in the real world.

15. Timelines. Students can work together to add text and pictures to mark events on a timeline. Use the same elements from the informational graphics above to create timelines. Add a horizontal line to a drawing. (Pro tip: Hold down shift while drawing the line to make it truly horizontal and straight!) Add information for the different dates on the timeline and illustrate them with images. When they're finished, the image can be saved as an image file (JPEG or PNG) or a PDF file. It can also be embedded in a site to share with others.

16. "Add and pass" activity. To spark creativity for the day, have students create a new drawing and add a few elements to it (some shapes, lines, etc.) and pass it digitally to another student (through a shared folder or with a link). View the students' work in class afterward. These drawings can be used as writing prompts or story starters too. You can even use these images as the prompt for the "add and pass" activity in docs mentioned above!

17. Collaborative interactive posters. Creating posters is an activity that's a staple in many classrooms. If you don't want to hassle with glue sticks, markers and magazines for cutting images out, Google Drawings can help. Drawings is a great spot for creating interactive posters. Regular posters are static and only contain the information you can fit on them. Interactive posters have clickable links, making the poster just a starting point for more information.

How to do it: Students create a Google Drawing and share it with the other members of their group. They add text boxes with information and shapes to help organize (think of the construction paper behind the text). They can add Creative Commons images by going to Insert > Image ... > Search tab to be good digital citizens. (This falls right in line with my post on how to find and use images the right way in class!) They can highlight text and push Ctrl+K or go to Insert > Link ... to make clickable links in their text. Want some more guidance? Check out my post on interactive Google Drawings posters with an example you can click on and copy into your Drive if you'd like.

18. Picture This and Take a Stance. Instead of asking students to write a quote or caption like in the caption this activity above, let's start with a quote!

Have students find a quote from your content or a character/historical figure and add it in a speech/thought bubble to a Google Drawing. Students will then share it with a partner.

Their partner adds a picture that illustrates the quote. They can find an image using "Insert" and "Image" and "Search the web."

Students explain the scene. Students can add a text box or a shape at the bottom of the image for typing text to explain the scene.)

Once they have added their explanation of the scene, then they form an opinion/take a stance and write about their opinion/stance. You can even ask students to add a Bitmoji, avatar, emoji or other images that represent how they feel and have it take a stance. (Note: Some Bitmoji images are inappropriate for younger children. You might want to use emojis instead OR just download some Bitmoji images in a Google Drive folder you can share with students.)

When they're done, have students turn the image into you via Google Classroom (or however you collect digital work).

FORMS

19. "Choose your own adventure" stories. This one can take some serious student planning, but the results are worth it. Using the "Go to page based on answer" feature in Forms, students can work together to create a story where the reader chooses how the story unfolds. Students write the story and give the reader options with multiple-choice questions.

20. Exercise or reading logs. There are many things students can log using forms. Teachers gather information using forms. Student data is gathered in a spreadsheet, where it can be sorted and analyzed. Teachers can display any information they see as pertinent to classes for discussion or analysis.

21. Digital share out. Students can use a Google Form to share their learning. Have students respond to the same Google Form sharing their information, ideas, reflection and a link to their work. Provide a "view only" link to the spreadsheet of results to the class. That way, everyone can see everyone else's ideas all in one place. Changing the sharing permissions to "anyone with the link can comment" allows students to give feedback to one another within the same Google Sheet.

HANGOUTS

22. Mystery Hangouts. Using Hangouts - Google's video chat service - classes from different parts of the country or the world can play this "guess where we are" game. Find a class (using your own contacts or through this Mystery Hangouts Google Plus group) and video chat using Hangouts. Students ask each other yes/no questions until they guess where in the world the other class is. A Mystery Hangout is a great, fun, engaging activity that more classes should take advantage of.

23. Sharing learning. After you've had a Mystery Hangout, continue that connection between the two classes. Connect and share what each class has been learning - or share in the same lesson across many miles. Ask questions. Reflect. Add information. Use each other as a resource. It's a great way to connect your classroom to the world.

24. Guest speakers. Can't afford to fly in an author, researcher, professor, historian or scientist that's an expert in what you're studying? Try to arrange a Google Hangout. Even a short Hangout can make a long-lasting connection with students. All speakers need is a webcam, an Internet connection and some time. You never know if they'll do it until you ask!

SITES

25. Share and discuss student work. By creating a site for student work - either individual student ePortfolios or a class site - you're giving your students' hard work at home online. You also give it a global audience. Anyone in the world can find and comment on their work. Sure beats writing for just the teacher - an audience of one.

26. Create a class or group Breakout EDU Digital. Like the choose your own adventure activity this will also take some serious planning and combines quite a few G Suite apps embedded in a Google Site. With Google Forms and data validation, students can create a digital version of the locked box and hasp from Breakout EDU then use presentations, drawings, docs or other puzzles making tools to create clues.

Be sure to check out this Wakelet collection of ready to play Breakout EDU Digital games for you and your students. It's a great idea to experience the game from a player's perspective before diving in and creating one of your own.

Mandi Tolen, a Missouri math teacher, and #DitchBook Twitter chat regular, created a Breakout EDU Digital game for her students. It's called, "Digital Breakout Data Cruncher."

She's a big fan of using Breakout EDU Digital to get kids excited about learning. "BreakoutEDU is a great 'hook' for a lesson," she said. " It provides opportunities for students to problem solve and persevere. While solving the Breakout, students will be learning about the content. It would also be amazing to have students create their own BreakoutEDU."

Mandi's steps:

You can create a digital BreakoutEDU using Googles Sites as the shell. By inserting a two column table onto the main page of your site and embedding a Google Form on one side and Google Drawing image on the other, you can create an exciting adventure for your students.

On the Google Form, you will insert a timer from YouTube (BreakoutEDU has one you can use or find another if you want less then 45 minutes) and make sure you validate each answer so students can't continue until they have entered the correct clue.

In Google Draw, create your image with invisible hotspots linking to the websites or clues. To create an invisible hotpot, create a shape on top of the image and change the line and fill to transparent. You can still insert a link into the invisible shape. Make sure its order is in the front. Have a few people test your BreakoutEDU to make sure they can solve the clues. You know what you intended but you want to make sure the clues aren't to difficult (or easy.)

Play "Digital Breakout Data Cruncher" here: https://sites.google.com/site/digitalbreakoutdatacruncher/

And check out Mandi's tutorial on making a Breakout EDU Digital game: https://infinitelyteaching.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/make-a-digital-breakoutedu/

Want some more guidance? Check out this guest blog post by Justin Birckbichler and Mari Venturino on creating and using Breakout EDU digital games in your classroom.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM

27. Share project resources. Students can use the stream in Google Classroom as a place for posting ideas and conversation - to list sites, articles, and ideas for a collaborative project.

28. Take a quick poll. Create a question in Google Classroom. You can create short answer or multiple choice questions and can also have students reply to one another.

29. Create a Frequently Asked Questions section (or document). Create an "anyone can edit" FAQ document for frequently asked questions. When any student asks a question, type your response (and the question) in the document. Or ask the student to type a summary of your answer in the document for other students! In fact, students can be encouraged to add questions their peers might come across with their own responses

30. Group activities. Google Classroom allows you to assign an activity to a group. Then, all the group members are all together in one place. You won't have to check and double check who is in which group.

What are other ways to use Google Apps to help students, teachers and others at schools collaborate? Which of these are you most apt to use? Share your ideas in a comment below!

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30 collaborative Google Apps activities for schools - Ditch That Textbook

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G Suite has revolutionized education. With its highly collaborative, online/offline format - and its attractive price tag (free!) it provides students and teachers with effective tools for a blended learning environment. The way that G Suite is interactive and easy to share is powerful.

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When Students Become Teachers - Communicating Your Learning!

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When Students Become Teachers - Communicating Your Learning!

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When Students Become Teachers - Rigor, Assessment & Accountability - Dr. Lodge McCammon

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Sentence Stems for Higher Level Discussions

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Sentence Stems for Higher Level Discussions

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Teaching is simultaneously one of the hardest and one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. We often say that students make it worth it, but there's something else that can make or break your happiness as a teacher: your colleagues.

In this article, " Research Shows Teacher Collaboration Helps Raise Student Achievement," researcher Carrie Leana writes about the missing link in school reform: teacher collaboration. In her study of over 1,000 4th and 5th grade teachers in New York City, Leana found that, "students showed higher gains in math achievement when their teachers reported frequent conversations with their peers that centered on math, and when there was a feeling of trust or closeness among teachers."

Collaboration begins with finding time to connect with colleagues, to share thoughts, and provide support. Here are 3 tips for successful collaboration:

1. Build Relationships: Teaching is emotionally draining, and the best colleagues can be there for you in all types of situations. A student erupted in anger? Go next door at lunch time and get a hug. A student said a wildly funny thing in the middle of class? Pop your head into a colleague's classroom and let your laughter loose.

Remember to ask your colleagues to share their trials and triumphs with you, too. Sometimes just asking fellow teachers how their day is going opens up the doors for productive and bonding conversations.

The relationships you build with colleagues aren't just good for your mental well being; they're also the foundation of collaboration that can result in increased student achievement. Just like building relationships with students lays the groundwork for academic success, building relationships with colleagues lays the groundwork for effective collaboration.

2. Find Time to Collaborate: Shared planning time allows teachers to collaborate during the school day. With shared planning time, teachers are able to make strides in planning rigorous and appropriate lessons for their students.

Ideally, your school provides you time within the school day to collaborate with colleagues. If this is not possible, consider lobbying to use some of your school's professional development time for grade level or department teams.

Consider ways that you can collaborate both in and outside school. Sneak a few minutes before or after school to check in with colleagues. Think about collaborating virtually using Google Docs, Skype, or email.

Watch these videos to see examples of collaborative teams in action:

Teaching as a Team Sport (Video Playlist)
Algebra Team: Teacher Collaboration
Leadership Teams (Success at the Core Learning Module)

3. Share Responsibility: The best teacher teams complement each other. Share the responsibility for planning by dividing tasks based on your strengths and interests. When deciding how to share responsibility, consider these questions:

What do I enjoy planning? What does my colleague enjoy planning?

How much time do we have?

What makes sense to plan together? What could we plan separately?

How can we share our plans and get feedback from each other?

Successful collaborations happen when teachers work together to share the workload instead of doubling their efforts. From the delegation of tasks, teachers are also able to learn more from each other as they come back together to review and assemble their separate assignments into a cohesive lesson plan.
Download a printable version of this blog. Lily Jones taught K/1 for seven years in Northern California. She has experience as a curriculum developer, instructional coach, teacher trainer, and is also a contributing writer for Teaching Channel.

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Teaching is simultaneously one of the hardest and one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. We often say that students make it worth it, but there's something else that can make or break your happiness as a teacher: your colleagues.

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How It's Done

The seventh-grade curriculum at University Park includes a strong focus on building foundational group-work skills. A lot of students are self-conscious when they come to UPCS, observes math teacher Kathy Murphy. "They don't want others to know if they're having trouble with solving a problem, and they're shy about speaking," says Murphy.

UPCS' middle school grades introduce students to the roles and expectations of group work and build their comfort around participating. By high school, the teachers can step back to let students direct their own group work.

Here's how UPCS educators teach group work:

Step 1: Help Students Experience Group Work Through Warm-Up Activities

Warm-up activities can increase your students' awareness about what makes good and bad group work.

"Students think that they do good group work, but then you see students who aren't talking to each other," says Murphy. "They're like, 'Here, let me read that,' and they do it on their own. That's not group work."

In Murphy's seventh-grade class, her students do the following warm-up activities to help them better understand what doing good group work feels like:

1. Without talking, have your students line up by height. "All students understand what height is. It's definitely accessible to all," explains Murphy. Time your students to see how quickly they can do this activity.

2. Without talking, have your students line up by birthday. Time them.

3. Have your students line by the number of their street address. This time, your students can say only their street number.

4. Reflect with your students. Murphy asks her students, "What do you notice?" They realize that when they talk and listen to each other, group work is easier, and they are able to achieve their goal more quickly.

Step 2: Share How People Learn in Different Ways

Share a personal example of how you have learned from a student to show that everybody has a unique perspective, something to contribute, and that there are many ways to come up with one solution.

Murphy shares a story with her class about assigning a problem to a previous class. "I myself, being a college graduate and a math major, had this big, elaborate way to solve it. But a ten-year-old did the same exact problem, and I couldn't believe how fabulous his answer was. We got the same answer, and we got to the solution differently. He drew a picture, and it was fabulous."

Step 3: Build Comfort Around Speaking in a Group

At the beginning of the year, assign problems that every student can access and feel comfortable about contributing his or her ideas. By incorporating low-stakes writing or verbal prompts (such as, "What do you notice?"), you encourage kids to feel safe in participating. "Even if they don't know the answer, they can say, 'Well, I noticed there's a pattern that is increasing by two,'" says Murphy.

Step 4: Give Students Roles

In middle school, teachers at University Park lay out more defined roles for their students. Having these specific roles helps students feel more comfortable with participating and prompts them with ways to participate. By the upper grades of high school, students no longer need roles defined for them and are able to jump into group work without guidance.

Roles vary depending on the subject and assignment. "In a literature circle, one person may have the researcher role, one person the facilitator role, and one person the wordsmith role," suggests Principal St. Louis.

In Murphy's seventh-grade math class, she has her students take on the group roles of a questioner, summarizer, and clarifier.

To help her students follow through with their roles, Murphy gives them a sheet of paper with their role description and verbal prompts. This builds comfort in speaking up because they're following directions, instead of having to know what to say or how to contribute on their own.

Here's a sample of what their role directions and prompts look like:
Your Job as Questioner:
Read the problem to the group. After the summarizer takes a turn:

Determine what questions to ask about what you read.

Explain what you were thinking while the problem was read aloud.

Describe a possible strategy and ask your group if it will work.

You can start your conversation with:

I wonder what it means when the problem said _______?

How can we _______?

Could we use _______ to start to solve this problem? ( _______ could be a table, chart, picture, equation.)

In solving the problem:

Check all math calculations for accuracy.

Make sure each group member participates in completing the work.

Ask questions about each step of your work to make sure everyone understands how to solve the problem.

"It's like a baby learning to walk," offers Murphy. "They need a little stroller to hold onto or a ledge to brace themselves. And until they can do that, you can't take that away. It's easing them into being able to do great group work on their own."

Download UPCS' directions and group work prompts for the roles of questioner, summarizer, clarifier, designer/artist, reader/checker, and writer/questioner (PDF).

Step 5: Create a Strong Group-Work Problem

Created by UPCS, here are the characteristics of a good group-work problem:

It involves a goal that would be difficult to accomplish alone.

The roles that students take on to solve the problem are interdependent.

There are multiple interpretations on solving the problem.

It includes an element of discovery and curiosity.

It connects to a piece of literature.

It needs to be rigorous. The expectations for a group problem are set higher than a problem that a student would solve alone, and the end product must be something more rigorous than drawing a picture and making a poster.

Students should explore and synthesize unfamiliar sources (for example, as if preparing for a debate).

Students should understand the content deeply enough that they're able to teach it.

"One of my favorite group-work activities when I taught Orwell's 1984 was a jigsaw where, for example, five groups of five students might each read a different news article about the modern world," recalls St. Louis. "Then, each student would join a new group of five where they need to explain their previous group's article to each other and make connections to each. Using these connections, the group must then construct a definition of the word 'Orwellian.' I certainly could have simply told passive students the definition of this term and what it means, but by enabling them to actively construct their own knowledge, they internalize the ideas more deeply -- as well as internalize their ability to have voice and agency in an academic setting."

Step 6: Group Students by Their Complementary Strengths

If a group problem requires different skills, choose students with those skills so that they can solve the problem together and rely on each other for their different strengths. "Sometimes I'll group students together because I know that this particular kid is good at drawing one thing out of another, or that one of them might have strong spatial skills, and another might have strong symbolic skills, and if we could have them working together, they can try to bridge that," explains Shannon Hammond, a University Park ninth, eleventh, and twelfth-grade teacher. "If I know a kid is particularly going to struggle with some construction aspect, they're going to be balanced with somebody that isn't as challenged by the construction aspect."

Help parents and students understand that every student has something to contribute.

Sometimes parents will tell you that they want their student to be challenged and question how group work can do that. Sometimes you'll get students with a strong understanding of the content who want to work on their own without classmates slowing them down.

When students or parents share these concerns with Murphy, she tells them about the three levels of understanding and explanation:

1. You know enough to convince yourself.

2. You know enough to convince a friend who loves you.

3. You know enough to convince a skeptic.

"That's what I talk to the high fliers about," says Murphy. "They're solid in their understanding and can do the work, but how well can they explain it to others? Explaining what you know to others raises your level of understanding, and a lot of kids struggle with that."

Murphy often has students who at first don't see the value in working with others. They may be good at putting what they know into an equation, but when she asks them to show their understanding in another way -- with blocks, for example -- they have a hard time with it. When this happens, often the students whose ability they doubted are able to help them. "Even the kid who thinks they are the top student can learn something from the other students," states Murphy, "and they learn that we all have different strengths and different things that we can contribute."

Step 7: Assess Group Work

A big part of assessing group work is watching the group in action and seeing how they work together, says Murphy. When her students work in groups, she has every student write in his or her own notebook. Knowing what her students should be able to accomplish by the end of class, such as completing three math problems, she can look at their notebooks and see how far they have gotten. If they've only completed one problem, she knows that she should check their understanding or how they're working with other students.

Here are some of Murphy's formative assessments to check student understanding:

Quick quizzes: She gives each student one to two problems (similar to problems that they've solved within their group) to check their individual understanding.

Exit tickets: A group work rubric (PDF) is an exit ticket for students to grade themselves on how they worked in their group and how their group worked as a whole. Her students are honest with their reflections, and if they rate themselves a one or a two, she asks, "How can we improve that?"

Daily check-ins: Five to seven minutes before class ends, Murphy's eighth-grade students reflect on how they each did that day (What was good about today? Any ah-ha moments?). "Even though I'm hopefully meeting every group multiple times during the class, individually, each student can say how they think the day went, " says Murphy. "They'll say if they are confused about something. They'll say if they thought it worked great."

"Student voice is really important to us," declares St. Louis, and the student voice and agency that University Park fosters in their students flows outside of the classroom. "I have kids come to me as a group every single day. I had four seventh-grade students come to me the other day. They want to do a bake sale to raise money for the Lymphoma Society." His students set up a fundraiser competition between seventh and eighth grade. St. Louis concludes, "They see the value in teamwork."

Resources

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Using Collaborative Learning to Build Student Agency | Edutopia

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The seventh-grade curriculum at University Park includes a strong focus on building foundational group-work skills. A lot of students are self-conscious when they come to UPCS, observes math teacher Kathy Murphy. "They don't want others to know if they're having trouble with solving a problem, and they're shy about speaking," says Murphy.