Some teachers prefer a quite room where students are independently working on completing a task. Not me! I love the buzzing sound of students working together and teaching one another. I find sometimes, they even do a better job at teaching one another than me standing up there! Which is why it is so important that I build talking skills into our daily work. Just like with anything, we must explicitly teach, model, and give feedback on conversational skills. I'm sharing a few things I've done in my room to help this year.
Conversational Moves
First, we need to discuss what it means to have a conversation and more importantly, how do we make it MOVE! We created this chart together. I prepared it before hand and left spaces for us to fill in. You can tell because my handwriting got all messy #teachertruth.
Give 'Em Supports
Later, we talked about the different types of way we can participate in a conversation. I made a handy hand-out that students glued into their notebooks. I however can NOT find the one that I made at school, so I retyped it up to share with you all! Click on the picture to download your own version!
We talked about 4 ways (there are more, but we are starting with these four) we can participate:
If you are looking for a more permanent display, I have sentence stems in my store for purchase here. I found that having a student copy easily at their finger tips is great for book clubs and partnership talks.
Here's the best part about this work: you can use it during ANY content! This is something you can always work into your daily work. Give your students the opportunity to have meaningful conversation and the supports and you will see their engagement and understanding of the topic just blossom!
How do you help students share their ideas with each other?
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