Academic Discourse
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Collaborative Conversations: Speaking and Listening in Secondary Classrooms
West Ed Schools Moving Up Webinar Archive and links to resources (Feb 13, 2013)
Nancy Frey

Collaborative Conversations -- Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey
Speaking and listening standards ensure that students can communicate effectively and build on one another’s ideas
Conversation Roundtable
Students need time every day in every class to practice their collaborative conversations.
An easy way to do this is to use a conversation roundtable.
Students fold a piece of paper to form 4 quadrants. As they read a selected piece of text, they
take notes in the upper left quadrant. Then they take turns discussing the text and recording the content that their peers share in the other quadrants. At the end of the conversation,
they can summarize their understanding of the text, identify the theme, or ask questions (depending on the task that was assigned by the teacher) in the area in the center.


Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk That Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings (September 2011) Stenhouse
Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford
Five Core Academic Conversation Skills
Skill 1 -- Elaborating, clarifying, questioning
Skill 2 -- Supporting ideas with examples and evidence
Skill 3 -- Building on ideas
Skill 4 -- Paraphrasing
Skill 5 -- Synthesizing key ideas of the conversation


Classroom Discussion

Rethinking Small Group Instruction in the Intermediate Grades -- Nancy Boyles
Instructional Focus: Discussion (Sample Lesson)
What resources will I need for teaching and assessing discussion? (Generic resources with page numbers)
Ways to Have a Good Discussion (discuss and post these helpful guidelines to keep students talking in a discussion), page 178·
Literature Discussion Prompts(for building students’ capacity to talk about text; post these near your small-group reading area and refer to them often as you teach students to build on each other’s ideas, respectfully disagree, etc.), page 179·
Rubric for Examining Teachers’ Expertise in Leading a Discussion(Teachers should reflect on their capacity to elicit student discourse. Or, this rubric can be used by literacy coaches or administrators when helping teachers to improve their classroom discussions about a text), page 180·
Discussion Rubric for Assessing Student Discourse(Teachers can assess students’ discussion skills using these criteria), page 181·
Checklist for Reflecting on Discussion Skills(Students can refl ect on their own discussion skills using the same criteria as in the rubric above—but in a simplified format), page 182How do i measure students’ success?
Respectful and engaged participation in the discussion based on:
Level 1: Teacher-prompted responses that reveal deep thinking about a text
Level 2: Unprompted responses that demonstrate students’ deep thinking and capacity to build on each other’s ideas with a teacher guiding the discussion
Level 3: Unprompted responses that demonstrate students’ deep thinking and capacity to build on each other’s ideas with a peer acting as the discussion facilitator

Close Reading – Re-reading with a purpose; repeated readings for various purposes; repeated reading to answer text-dependent questions; repeated reading for deep comprehension
Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey on Close Reading and the CCSS
Great resources that support Nancy and Doug's latest book, Rigorous Reading
See Chapter 4 Resources

• Figure 4.2 Speaking and Listening Anchor Standard 1 (PDF)
• Figure 4.3 Discussion Roundtable (PDF)
• Figure 4.4 Individual Self-Assessment for Older Students (PDF)
• Figure 4.5 Self-Assessment for Younger Students (PDF)
• Videos
  

The 5 Access Points Toward Proficiency

1. Purpose & Modeling: Teachers think aloud to demonstrate critical thinking and how good readers always know why they are reading.
2. Close & Scaffolded Reading Instruction: Teachers engage students in repeated readings and discussions, with text-dependent questions, prompts, and cues to help students delve into an author’s ideas.
3. Collaborative Conversations: Teachers orchestrate collaborative learning to get students in the habit of exercising their analytical thinking in the presence of their peers.
4. An Independent Reading Staircase: Teachers artfully steer students to more challenging books, with strategic bursts of instruction and peer conferences to foster metacognitive awareness.
5. Performance: Teachers offer feedback and assessments that help students demonstrate understanding of text in authentic ways and plan instruction based on student understanding.