Fostering Effective Classroom Discussion:
Be thinking about these questions and be ready to discuss your thoughts. Record your response to the following questions and then when prompted, share them with your partner.
A: When has a classroom discussion worked really well for you?
B: When has it not worked so well?
C: What factors contributed to both situations?
Today's Learning Targets:
- - I will learn the importance that effective discussion has in the classroom.
- - I will become more aware of what effective classroom discussion IS and what it ISN'T.
- - I will learn how to implement at least three new effective classroom discussion
strategies that I can use in my lessons.
Our Norms....
- Please turn cell phones to vibrate.
- Please text and make phone calls during breaks and lunch only.
- Please use laptops and tablets only as directed.
- Honor the speaker and your peers - no sidebar conversations.
- Be positive and participate. :)
Here are the top 10 influences on achievement from John Hattie’s research:
Classroom Discussion #7
Rank Most Influence Effect Size
1 Self-reported grades/Student expectations 1.44
2 Piagetian programs 1.28
3 Response to Intervention 1.07
4 Teacher credibility 0.90
5 Providing formative evaluation 0.90
6 Micro-teaching 0.88
7 Classroom discussion 0.82
8 Comprehensive interventions for learning disabled students 0.77
9 Teacher clarity 0.75
10 Feedback
Hattie defines classroom discussion as:
Classroom Discussion #7
Rank Most Influence Effect Size
1 Self-reported grades/Student expectations 1.44
2 Piagetian programs 1.28
3 Response to Intervention 1.07
4 Teacher credibility 0.90
5 Providing formative evaluation 0.90
6 Micro-teaching 0.88
7 Classroom discussion 0.82
8 Comprehensive interventions for learning disabled students 0.77
9 Teacher clarity 0.75
10 Feedback
Hattie defines classroom discussion as:
- a method of teaching, that involves the entire class in a discussion.
- allows students to improve communication skills by voicing their opinions and thoughts.
- activity where everyone learns from each other.
- builds students' higher-order thinking skills.
- can only take place in a climate in which students feel safe to offer their ideas, take risks, and dig for deeper meaning.
Something to Think About When Planning Classroom Discussions....
Think Pair Share/ Classroom Mingle
Article: www.cultofpedagogy.com/speaking-listening-techniques/
A. Did this article resonate with you? How?
B. What should a good classroom discussion look and sound like? Describe.
http://kennycmckee.com/3-ways-to-make-turn-and-talks-work/
Think Pair Share/ Classroom Mingle
Article: www.cultofpedagogy.com/speaking-listening-techniques/
A. Did this article resonate with you? How?
B. What should a good classroom discussion look and sound like? Describe.
http://kennycmckee.com/3-ways-to-make-turn-and-talks-work/
Fish hook questions: (n.) plural. Questions thrown out to a class or group in hopes that someone will answer; often followed by squirmy silence and often answered by the same 2 or 3 students every day.
Quiz: How do you know if you're asking fish hook questions?
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Hearing Crickets when you start a Classroom Discussion...? You may be asking Fish Hook questions. Thanks to Kathy Bonyun, BCS!
Why don't more students respond in class? The answers lie in how we process information.
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What if my students don't have the skills
to have an effective discussion?
to have an effective discussion?
Effective Student Talk and Discussion Strategies:
Fish Bowl
Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person’s point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically “coach” the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants’ conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.
Gallery Walk
Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.
Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein’s high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
Philosophical Chairs
A statement that has two possible responses—agree or disagree—is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.
Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from “Strongly Agree” on one side of the room, all the way to “Strongly Disagree” on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.
Pinwheel Discussion
Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as “provocateurs,” tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the “speaker”) sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.
Socratic Seminar
Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak.
Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by “tapping in” as the urge strikes them.
Affinity Mapping
Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as “What were the impacts of the Great Depresssion?” or “What literary works should every person read?” Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.
Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise—recording their ideas and arranging them into categories--without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
Concentric Circles
Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.
Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of “rotating” to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.
Conver-Stations
This is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers’ ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn’t happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group’s conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.
Hot Seat
One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates’ questions while staying in character in that role.Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone’s participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the “character” and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
Snowball Discussion
Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.
Asynchronous Voice
One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we’re limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can “discuss” a topic from 3pm until bedtime—asynchronously—each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues.
BackChannel Discussions
A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet. It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn’t have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute.
Talk Moves
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person’s argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.
Teach OK
Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT’s foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It’s a bit like think-pair-share, but it’s faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.
Think-Pair-Share
Think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. It breaks content into bite-sized pieces. The brain can only process so much at one time and to learn material you must interact with it. It takes students out of the "sitting and getting" mode and provides them time to think, talk, and process.
Classroom Mingle
This discussion technique allows learners to actively engage with new content by moving around the classroom, asking and answering questions with multiple members of the class. Afterwards, there is an opportunity for group review and reflection. Use Classroom Mingle at any point in the lesson to structure meaningful conversation. Working in their pairs, Student A asks Student B his/her question. After answering, Student B asks Student A his/her question. Next, they exchange strips of paper, and each one finds another member of the class who is also looking for a new partner. The process is repeated.
To create a more structured mingle, the teacher can monitor the time for each interaction. After a set amount of time to share questions in pairs, music can be played. Students should move around the classroom. When the music stops, students find a new partner standing near them.
Turn and Talk
Pose a question or prompt for students to discuss and tell them how much time they will have. A one-to-two minute discussion is most productive. Have students turn to a specific partner. Pair students using Eyeball Partners, Shoulder Partners, or Clock Partners (see variations below). Partner assignments should be set up beforehand so that students can quickly and easily pair up. Set a timer for the allotted time, and have students begin discussing the assigned question or prompt. When time is up, ask partners to share out thoughts and ideas from their discussion.
Walk, Talk, Decide
This partner strategy allows students to work together to solve a problem or respond to a question. Students walk around the room while having a structured talk with a partner, providing an opportunity to move and process their learning.
Prepare a prompt or question that has multiple answers and requires discussion. Pose the prompt to students and tell them how long they will have to discuss with a partner. At the end of this time, they will share their response with the class.
Students pair up and walk around the room with their partner the allotted time. During this time, they are discussing their response. They must agree on a response that they will share with the rest of the class.
After the allotted time has passed, ask students to freeze where they are. Do a quick whip around the room to hear each partner group’s response. Be sure to discuss any errors in thinking or misconceptions that were shared, as well as point out any great ideas.
Inside/Outside Circles
This discussion technique gives students the opportunity to respond to questions and/or discuss information with a variety of peers in a structured manner. Students form two concentric circles and exchange information with a partner until the teacher signals the outer circle to move in one direction, giving each student a new peer to talk to.
1. Split the ClassDecide which half of the students will form the inside circle and which half will form the outside circle.
2. QuestionPut a question or statement on the board. Give students at least ten seconds to think of an answer on their own.
3. ShareAsk students in the inside circle to share their response with the classmate facing them in the outside circle. When they have done this, ask them to say "pass,” at which point their partners in the outside circle will share their responses.
4. RotateOn your signal, have the outside circle move one step to the left or right and discuss the same question with the new partner. Option: post a new question or give the new partners a different discussion point.