TOOLKIT
Facilitate Learning Conversations
Teaching Conversation Skills
The strategies and resources below can support students with developing their conversation skills. They Can be used with many different kinds of discussion structures.
Prewriting
Drawing, journaling, or completing a graphic organizer can help students organize their ideas before diving into a discussion. To build students’ conversational skills, encourage them to put away their notes once they begin the discussion.
- Resource: The Ultimate List of Graphic Organizers for Teachers and Students [Creately]
Sentence Starters
Provide students with sentence starters for contributing to a conversation, and for prompting others to share. Make sure students know that they don’t have to use the sentence frames exactly as they are—that they are just examples to refer to. When in the classroom, you can post these on a wall, print them onto bookmarks, or have students tape them into notebooks.
- Resource: Sentence Starters for Upper and Lower Grades [Google Doc]
- Resource: 26 Sentence Stems For Higher-Level Conversation In The Classroom [TeachThought]
Vocabulary Development
Build students’ comfort with content-specific vocabulary through exercises like the Frayer Model or Word Connections chart. Provide students with a list of vocabulary or a word wall to refer to during discussions.
- Resource: Frayer Model Template [Adapted from Ditch that Textbook]
- Resource: Word Connections Template [Adapted from Zwiers, J. and Crawford, M., 2011]
- Resource: Frayer Model Subject Examples
Participation Supports
Encourage all students to participate in the conversation by providing them with visual cues that help them keep track of who has participated in the conversation and who still needs or wants to contribute.
- 3-12 Strategy: Using Hand Signals for More Equitable Discussion [Edutopia]
- Strategy: Discussion Mapping [Edutopia]
- K-12 Resource: Conversation Coins
- 3-12 Resource: Hand Signals for Discussion
Reflection
Give students a checklist or a rubric to help them evaluate their participation in academic discussions. Having students reflect on their use of key skills for academic conversations will build their self-awareness and their skills for future conversations, and will help students see that the skills needed to lead and participate in academic conversations can be developed with practice.
- Resource: Academic Conversations Checklist [editable self-assessment]
- Home Resource: Reflecting on Class Participation with Your Family -- English | Spanish
Discussion Structures
Check out some of the strategies below for organizing full and small group discussions in your classroom! They are sorted into Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced categories to provide a scaffolded approach to learning conversations.
If your students are new to structured learning conversations, start with one of these. They involve less prep and provide easier entry points for students.
Take A Side
Hang posters with the words agree and disagree on opposite sides of the room and have students pick a side or place themselves on a continuum to show their opinion on a topic. You can have students pair off to talk to someone standing near them before sharing out with the class. For a tech-enabled version of this activity using Jamboard, have students add a sticky note with their name to the box that best represents their opinion about a prompt and use the responses to create discussion groups.
- Video Barometer Strategy [Facing History]
- Resource: Take a Side Jamboard
Think-Pair-Share
This strategy requires students to work together to answer a question or solve a problem. Ask your students to consider a question or problem (think), then they will turn to a partner (pair), and discuss their thoughts with their partner (share).
- Learn More: In Praise of Think-Pair-Share [Cult of Pedagogy]
- K-8 Resource: Think-Pair-Share Lesson Plans [Read Write Think]
If your students have had some practice with learning conversations, try these strategies to build upon their discussion skills.
Gallery Walk
A gallery walk is a great way to get students moving and talking to their peers about thought-provoking prompts by having small groups of students rotate to different prompt posters, and reading, discussing and adding to what previous groups have written. For a tech-enabled option, you can swap posters for Google Slides.
- Strategy: Gallery Walk [The Teacher Toolkit]
- Video: Gallery Walk [K20 Center]
2, 4, 6, 8, Problem Solving
Have students tackle a math problem by starting off with two minutes of think time, discussing ideas for how to solve the problem with a partner in a breakout room, working independently for six minutes to solve the problem, and then meeting back up with their partner to come up with a written explanation for the problem. You can have students submit their collaborative written work on a separate shared Google slides document with one slide per group.
- Resource: 2, 4, 6, 8, Problem Solving
Use these structures with students who have had many opportunities to practice their learning conversation skills and are ready to flex their discussion muscles.
Three Act Math Tasks
Three act math tasks use images or videos to present students with problems and scenarios that lend themselves to rich mathematical discussions. These tasks are designed to engage students with a perplexing scenario, to allow for discussions about how reasonable proposed solutions are, and to allow for multiple problem-solving approaches.
- Video: Math Class Needs a Makeover [TedxNYED]
- Resource: 3 Act Tasks [SFUSD Mathematics Department]
Socratic Seminar (or Socratic Circle)
A Socratic Seminar is a great way to assess students’ academic conversation skills during a full group conversation. To facilitate a Socratic Seminar, select an engaging text and an opening question that will allow for students to formulate many different perspectives. Students prepare for the discussion by annotating the text and formulating their own follow-up questions. For larger classes, you can use a Fishbowl protocol, forming an inner circle of participants who will discuss the text and an outer circle who will observe the discussion and share their observations during a debrief.
- Learn More: Socratic Seminars: Building a Culture of Student-Led Discussion [Edutopia]
- Video: Scaffolding Discussion Skills with a Socratic Circle [Edutopia]
- Resource: Socratic Seminar Protocol [EL Education]
Check out The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies from Cult of Pedagogy for even more ideas!