Why is this important?

Content focused conversation accomplishes a number of goals at once:

• Students get a chance to process content, practice for writing or presentation, get feedback

• Students get a chance to get better at speaking and listening,  a key 21st century skill and part of the ELA standards

• Students are more engaged when they are asked to process, learn and discuss learning and ideas with others

• The ability to have learning-focused conversations determines the quality of a classroom learning community where students expect to interact around their learning.

SO -- learn better, engage more, develop interaction skills. Easy to see why this is one of the Ten Elements of Effective Instruction!

Consider one way/one time in the past week that you asked peers to talk to one another.

You might want to start here:

A Total Participation Techniques Professional Learning Activity (to grow your practice) by Himmele and Himmele

• Teaching Channel's "Socratic Seminar: Supporting Claims and Counterclaims": High School ELA

• Teaching Channel's "Pinwheel Discussions: Texts in Conversation": High School ELA

• Teaching Channel's "Formative Assessment: Collaborative Discussions": 4th Grade  ELA

• "Reader's Workshop Partnerships": Kindergarten ELA

Resources:

• Total Participation Techniques by Persida and William Himmele
• Total Participation Techniques website
• Total Participation Techniques Slide Show by ASCD
• Question Stems from Arthur Costa's Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking
• Partner Talk from ReadWriteThink
• Tracking Teacher Talk/Student Talk (adapted from the work of Jim Knight by Jill Cohen)