Throughout the quarter there have been many things I have learned from this class about how to incorporate more speaking and listening activities into my future classroom and how to teach my students these valuable communication skills. The ideas that have most stuck with me are the importance of creating a classroom environment at the beginning of the year which lends itself to discourse; the three types of classroom discourse and their different purposes; and how to choose a task or activity which encourages collaboration and equal participation in small groups. During our very first class, we worked together as a class to create a list of norms and expectations we all wanted to follow during class, and we refined that list during the second
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In the past I have often referred to all classroom discourse as discussion without thinking about what the goals of the discourse were or what the discourse would look like. We talked about the different types of discourse on May 10 when we looked at a chart and shared our experiences with each type of discourse; Walsh and Sattes also define discussion in chapter 2 of Questioning for Classroom Discussion, which made me think more about these distinctions. My current understanding of the purpose of each type of discourse is: the purpose of a debate is to convince people with an opposing viewpoint that your viewpoint is “right” or makes more sense based on the evidence and arguments presented; a debate might end when enough students agree with one viewpoint over another, or when the teacher determines that one viewpoint has been more strongly supported. The purpose of a discussion is often to share as many ideas and perspectives as possible; those ideas and perspectives could be contributing to a larger shared understanding, or they could be connected by participants, even if they don’t lead to one conclusion. The purpose of a dialogue is to listen to and understand other perspectives on an issue, even if participants still disagree with each other’s perspectives at the end of the dialogue. With these purposes (or at least …show more content…
I plan on spending some time at the beginning of the year to craft some norms and expectations for group work, partner sharing, and whole class discussion with my students; as we did in this class, I will revisit that list to revise it and refer back to it when reflecting upon our discussions and other activities with the students. I will be sure to model the communication skills that I want my students to develop, and ask them to reflect on what productive discourse looks like and sounds like when we are working on different activities. The activities I plan on including in my class which require and strengthen communication skills include think-pair-shares, which I used in my student teaching successfully and would continue to implement, with the occasional addition of time for each individual student to write down some ideas before sharing with a partner. I also plan on implementing group activities in which students have roles; in a math class, that might look like one student in a group writing down the group’s strategies on a piece of chart paper, one student asking questions to other to understand their different strategies, and one student speaking when that group shares with the entire class. Finally, I plan to have many
In the past I have often referred to all classroom discourse as discussion without thinking about what the goals of the discourse were or what the discourse would look like. We talked about the different types of discourse on May 10 when we looked at a chart and shared our experiences with each type of discourse; Walsh and Sattes also define discussion in chapter 2 of Questioning for Classroom Discussion, which made me think more about these distinctions. My current understanding of the purpose of each type of discourse is: the purpose of a debate is to convince people with an opposing viewpoint that your viewpoint is “right” or makes more sense based on the evidence and arguments presented; a debate might end when enough students agree with one viewpoint over another, or when the teacher determines that one viewpoint has been more strongly supported. The purpose of a discussion is often to share as many ideas and perspectives as possible; those ideas and perspectives could be contributing to a larger shared understanding, or they could be connected by participants, even if they don’t lead to one conclusion. The purpose of a dialogue is to listen to and understand other perspectives on an issue, even if participants still disagree with each other’s perspectives at the end of the dialogue. With these purposes (or at least …show more content…
I plan on spending some time at the beginning of the year to craft some norms and expectations for group work, partner sharing, and whole class discussion with my students; as we did in this class, I will revisit that list to revise it and refer back to it when reflecting upon our discussions and other activities with the students. I will be sure to model the communication skills that I want my students to develop, and ask them to reflect on what productive discourse looks like and sounds like when we are working on different activities. The activities I plan on including in my class which require and strengthen communication skills include think-pair-shares, which I used in my student teaching successfully and would continue to implement, with the occasional addition of time for each individual student to write down some ideas before sharing with a partner. I also plan on implementing group activities in which students have roles; in a math class, that might look like one student in a group writing down the group’s strategies on a piece of chart paper, one student asking questions to other to understand their different strategies, and one student speaking when that group shares with the entire class. Finally, I plan to have many