First of all I would like to wish you
all a Happy New Year!
As we begin the new year, I would like to blog
about something near and dear to my heart, TALKING! Anyone who knows me, knows
I love to talk. Conversation is something we all do so naturally. I will explore oral
language development and the specific strategy of “turn and talk.” I chose this
topic after the last set of Elementary Instructional Rounds. I would like to
begin by congratulating our elementary schools for their hard work and growth
in the area of student verbal discourse. YAY!!! Although progress has been
made, every school expressed a desire to continue to move students from one
level of verbal discourse to the next, so we know our work continues. To help facilitate this I found a good
resource (a website) to help guide teachers and establish procedures for
developing oral language (specifically turn and talk) in their students. The website discusses what it should like and
why. It also details a plan for
establishing routines and procedures. The site has videos to help teachers
understand the process for developing the turn and talk strategy.
Here is a brief description:
- Establish expectations (norms)
- Establish a signal for getting students to return to the large group
- Strategically partner students (students should be grouped within one level of each other, ex: high with a medium-high)
- Plan where turn and talk fits into the lesson (like with everything else, planning is key)
- Conversations need to be productive (students need to have the tools to be successful and engaged- academic vocabulary, background knowledge, and/or sentence stems (if needed))
Please visit the website for the
detailed plan and great ideas. (I will also add this link on my digital portfolio)
Remember to add variety to the turn and talk strategy. Some ideas for varying are: changing partners,
creating triads or groups of 4, asking students to share what their
partner(s) said, or adding to another student’s response.
We must remember that “language is a
child’s most powerful learning tool,” so we should capitalize on this by explicitly teaching our students
how to have meaningful conversations, how to reflect/monitor their learning,
and how to formulate ideas and share their thinking. Many of us are conversational learners and make meaning about
content and our world through conversation. But students don’t necessarily come
to school knowing the intricacies of conversation. It is critical for students
to learn what listening and speaking "look like" and "sound like" in order to be
able to engage with the content. This type of
classroom participation structure fosters oral language development. It’s important to remember this strategy must
be explicitly taught. Teachers need to model their thinking,
questioning, conversations and metacognition for students so they can truly
understand the thought and effort that should go into the turn and talk
conversations. Like anything thing else,
it’s only as good as the effort put into it.
It may seem tedious at first, but the results will be well worth it!
Good Luck!
