Picture this: You have the most well-thought out lesson plan for your read aloud complete with questions that are designed to get your students talking and sentence frames to help your students answer your discussion question. You read the book and then try to get start your discussion and…CRICKETS. It’s happened to me MANY times. The one type of book… Read More
How many times does this happen? You’re having a classroom discussion, your students are talking and then…crickets. You’re a great teacher, so you know that you need to provide adequate wait time, but that silence is deafening. All too often, I used to jump in and provide an idea or add a follow-up question to try to keep the conversation… Read More
Getting students to cite text evidence can be a difficult skill to teach. Strategic use of sentence stems, sentence starters or sentence frames can make all the difference. I’m going to use the example of the book Julian is a Mermaid by Jessica Love to illustrate my point. This is an accompanying post to another post about questioning techniques to… Read More
Not all classrooms are face-to-face, but discussions are still very important. It helps students share their ideas, hear new ideas and learn how to respond respectfully to new ideas. Learning is constructive! Distance learning or virtual learning is becoming more and more prevalent at all levels of education, so providing opportunities for virtual classroom discussions is essential. In previous blog… Read More
As teachers, we talk a LOT more than we realize. During student discussions, though, we really need to let the students talk. In this post I’ll be focusing on some of the main reasons that teachers jump into discussions and ways for decreasing teacher talk. It may not be easy, but you can do it! Watch how your student discussions… Read More
Welcome to Part 3 of my improving student discussion mini-series: Increasing Quality. If you’re at a point where your students are having discussions and everyone is talking, but the level of the conversation is really low-level. That is, maybe they’re not building off of each other’s ideas. Perhaps they’re repeating the same ideas that someone else said just so that… Read More
