Month: March 2017

Class Discussion for Teaching Goals

Although Stanford University’s Center for Teaching and Learning focuses primarily on university teaching, I have blogged in the past about their work and how to adapt the strategies for secondary classrooms. Their 2005 research and practice-based newsletter Speaking of Teaching exemplifies teaching strategies for classroom use. What matters from the research is that discussion must be taught, it is not naturally acquired, “Truly successful classroom discussions are guided by specific teaching goals such as increasing students’ comfort with the specialized language and methods of a field or developing critical thinking.” Ultimately, discussion-based teaching and learning should serve the following three elements:

Science Inquiry

The Inquiry Project focuses on the use of academic talk in the science curriculum. How do we get science teachers to value the use of academic discussion, deliberation, and debate when acquiring scientific vocabulary? Schools that integrate language and science instruction can close the science achievement gap for English-language learners, according to a yearlong analysis of six California school districts by the nonprofit Education Trust-West. Among the report’s recommendations are adopting the Next Generation Science Standards and providing regular, engaging language lessons. There is a quality for academic discussions that teachers should take note with the difference between “output” and true interaction. The Oakland Unified School District created a rubric for teachers to assess their own teaching practices, and to see how teachers can grow in the direction of offering better interaction between students in the classroom.

The Literacy in Learning Exchange  offers a webinar for science teachers to begin the process of teaching evidence-based argumentation within the science curriculum. “The presenters share examples of ways to teach students to glean appropriate evidence from informational texts and other resources and methods for compiling and sharing evidence in a cohesive, academic manner in both written and oral formats.” All of my colleagues can benefit from the Seven Ways to Scaffold Instruction for English Learners.

NPRed recently offered a story titled “English Language Learners: How Your State is Doing” to give more background on the 5 million (and growing) identified English Language Learners in the United States. An undercurrent that is reported is how “gifted” ELLs are not being identified as gifted and talented, and how educators are at-risk of failing to adequately serve this community.

Once again, the Teaching Channel offers great insight regarding the importance of teaching language learners the academic discussion techniques. I have pulled directly from Nicole Knight’s blog post:

Why are Academic Discussions So Important for Our ELLs?

Academic discussions help all students develop reasoning skills and deepens understanding of content and multiple perspectives. For ELLs, academic discussions are critical to language and content development because:

• ELLs need the opportunity to hear language in authentic and varied contexts. Teachers, as well as students with higher language proficiency, serve as language models. Particularly important is exposure to discipline-specific language so ELLs hear what it sounds like to communicate in an array of academic contexts.

• ELLs need opportunities to produce language in contextualized and purposeful ways. They need to practice applying form (e.g., grammar, vocabulary) and function (e.g., language used to clarify, explain, argue) to communicate and build ideas.

• ELLs benefit from redundancy of ideas and their related vocabulary. Discussion allows for multiple opportunities to hear new concepts and content explained, analyzed, and interpreted.

How Do We Make Sure Our ELLs are Fully Engaged in and Benefiting from Academic Discussions?

Just because we give students the opportunity to discuss, doesn’t mean they will. We need to provide additional supports and structures so that the students who can benefit the most from academic discussion actually do! Here are five important teaching strategies you can use to support your ELLs to fully participate:

1. Mix up your grouping structures, but give more time to pairs. Whole group discussions provide a great opportunity to model discussion skills, to hear a broad perspective of ideas, and to synthesize learning from small group or pair conversations. The biggest payoff, however, is paired conversations, because they maximize speaking time and increase overall engagement. Even when the structure is a whole-group discussion, consider inserting paired conversations (Turn and Talk or Think-Pair-Share) throughout to allow for ELLs to rehearse their ideas and related academic language.

2. Use discussion strategies that require every student to talk. You can simply open a discussion with a Round Robin, or use Talking Chips or Discussion Cards that allow for equitable participation. Watch students actively participate in discussions in Participation Protocols for Academic Discussions.

3. Provide language support. Providing students access to language resources, such as sentence stems and word banks, gives students both the academic language and confidence to participate. A note of caution: overuse of prescribed sentence starters or stems can actually stifle talk, as students just fill in the blanks. Better yet, have students rehearse a few choice sentence stems and relevant vocabulary before they engage in academic discussion. The goal is for students to know how to access and use language supports when needed and independently (Watch Talk Moves in Academic Discussion).

4. Accept imperfect language. When ELLs are engaged in academic discussion, privilege communication over precision of language. Overcorrection or too much attention to grammatically correct language can hinder ELLs language production and interrupt the flow of ideas. During a discussion, we want our ELLs to approximate correct and sophisticated language, not perfect it.

5. Expect and require extended responses. One of the biggest disservices to our ELLs is to accept one-word or abbreviated responses — even worse is when we complete their sentences. Instead, provide wait time, encourage students to continue, and press students for evidence by asking, “Why?” or, “Can you give me an example?”

I am one of the biggest fans of the Teaching Channel for teachers to see some of the best practices from around the country. When it comes to academic discussions and language learners, the Teaching Channel offers a lesson plan for “Participation Protocol for Academic Discussions” that demonstrates one way to track student participation, and create a structure that students need as a framework for their academic discussion success. One teacher adapts the Socratic seminar-style to a Senior Project and some of the additional strategies to assist English Language Learners. In “Academic Discussion: Analyzing Complex Texts” a teacher uses the discussion method to analyze texts in order to support English Language Leaners, and teach the academic moves necessary to analyzing text and speaking. In an additional video, “Talk Moves in Academic Discussions” a teacher describes how different “talk moves” or sentence starters can be helpful to second language learners. There is also a blog where teachers can offer resources. The most recent entries to the blog English Language Learners and Academic Conversations, I have pulled directly from a post from Jeff Zwiers regarding oral language skills ~

Here are three strategies to help develop oral language skills:

Strategy One: Adapt Activities to Include Authentic Talk

Adapting current activities to include more authentic, original, and extended discussions gives students opportunities to contribute more than one sentence to a conversation. Sometimes, we miss the opportunity to encourage language development. For example, many teachers use some form of a jigsaw activity, in which students get into expert groups, read a text, and answer questions or fill in charts. They then go to mixed home groups to share their information. Yet, often what happens is this: students just read aloud what another student has copied from a resource — and opportunities for oral language development are lost.

To improve this strategy, you can have the experts engage in a discussion of what to put, in their own words, onto paper. Then, they can rehearse what they’ll say — covering their papers to avoid reading aloud. Then in home groups, you can have each person glance at their notes, cover them again, and share with the group members, who listen and take notes. You can even ask students to try to speak in paragraphs, starting with a general claim or topic sentence, and then support it with evidence sentences. For example, in this video, notice how the talk evolves as students prepare their ideas for sharing.

Strategy Two: Use Activities that Develop Strong Language

Use activities that allow students to develop a “stronger and clearer” answer, as they talk to different partners successively in an activity. Instead of the all-too-common whole class discussion, with the teacher asking questions and a few students answering, ask a question and have students talk to three different partners. Or have students talk in different groups (see this 1-3-6 activity video).

A crucial aspect of this strategy is that students shouldn’t say the same thing each time; rather, they need to build on the language and ideas of previous partner(s) to improve, expand, clarify, and support their evolving answer each time they share it.

Example Activities (from Zwiers, O’Hara, Pritchard, 2014):

Interview Grid: Students talk with one different partner each time, making their answers stronger and clearer each time, taking minimal, if any, notes on the chart. Note that this activity can also work using inner-outer conversation circles, such as the one in this Debrief Circles video.

Opinion Formation Cards: Students receive a quotation from the text (before it’s read) that includes evidence for one side or the other of an issue. Students share their quotations and their evolving opinions, with reasons and evidence for them.

Opinion Continuum: Students share where they fall on the continuum of a two-sided issue and why. At the end, they share if they shifted at all along the continuum based on their conversations with partners.

Strategy Three: Use Strong Discussion Prompts

Try to use discussion prompts that foster evaluation in some way. Evaluation is usually needed for ranking, prioritizing, and choosing. For example, if you ask for evidence of a theme or a claim, many students just find the first three remotely evidence-y things they can, and stop there. But if you prompt students to rank the evidence from strongest to weakest, or to find the most influential cause of some war, you can often get deeper thinking and better conversation.

For instance, I was talking with a teacher who was asking this question, “How did the Civil War affect the families in the South?” I encouraged her to simply add “most affect” to force students to evaluate and discuss their opinions. When students evaluate, their ideas often differ. And if you allow them time to argue and negotiate the ideas, lots of learning can happen.

There is a extremely little academic literature in the Netherlands regarding debate use in secondary classrooms, whether it be for critical thinking or language acquisition. So far, the academic opus for Dutch debate is “Invest in What Energizes Students Learn: Investigating Students’ Attitude towards Debate in the Foreign Language Classroom.” Written by a Ph.D. student and two professors at Utrecht University, the research study focuses on the attitude of Dutch students towards debate as an instructional tool in the foreign language classroom. The authors found that “debate does not only help students deepen their comprehension of the issue/topic in question and foster their critical thinking abilities, but it helps them enhance their language proficiency as well. By facilitating input and output, debate has ability to furnish students with a chance to take part in a learning process that involves practicing the four major skills of language.”

Through surveys and interviews, the authors state that “the participants in general believe in the power of debate in honing their four language skills. One participant said ‘you practice all the skills at the same time’. When asked whether the factor of language proficiency is an ingredient that makes them like debate, all the interviewees answered in the affirmative. One further confirmed this by saying ‘you practice the [four] skills in a fun way [in the debate]’.” The authors further admit that there is not enough research on the impact of debate in the language classroom and more needs to be done. “To make the learning process successful, teachers should invest in the pedagogical tools that students admire and make them experience fun with learning. This study has revealed that students acclaim debate as an interesting teaching tool that energizes them to participate in a rich and engaging learning process. Therefore, debate as a teaching tool should get a place in the pedagogy of ESL/EFL teaching.”

I continue to follow Dave Stuart Jr.’s blog, especially when he posts about speaking and argumentation. In this blog post, Dave delves into what he calls the “5 Approaches to Teaching Argument” along with a link to his pop-up debates for classroom use.

Corrective Feedback

A topic of concern for teachers is the topic of corrective feedback to students. How much corrective feedback should be given to students? Can corrective feedback become prohibitive to learning L2? When should learners be corrected? How should learners be corrected? Professors Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani look at the importance of corrective feedback in second language acquisition. Some of their academic review noticed that “if it is accuracy that is the goal, then immediate correction is necessary; whereas, if fluency is the goal, then immediate correction that interrupts the flow of speaking is inappropriate.” Teachers must be careful with this. If students are frequently corrected, they will spend most of their time in school trying not to get caught “not knowing something.” It becomes a game that students are more than willing to play. Creating a culture of fluency serves language learners in our classrooms.

All classroom teachers must become more cognizant of corrective feedback, and the importance of their clinical practice for the teaching of speaking and writing to language learners. Overall, teachers should be selective in the errors they correct. This can be accomplished by “focus correction” where students are corrected regarding the focus put forward by the teacher. For instance, if the class focuses on passive vs. active voice, then the correction will only become focused on the students’ use of passive voice, etc.