Reading and Discussing Are Perfect Partners

Although it has officially been spring for several days, we are just beginning to thaw from our challenging winter.  As we come out from the cold, hopefully there is a sense of rejuvenation emerging, too.  Here is a challenge to coincide with your renewal:  INCREASE THE AMOUNT OF STUDENT ACADEMIC CONVERSATION IN YOUR CLASS!

I know that several of you have embraced the idea of students doing close reads. Student discussion and writing have to be a part of the mix.  At the January mini-conference, I shared 40 Ways to Read Text, which was compiled by the ELA section of NCDPI.  I put the strategies together in a LiveBinder for ease of use. Start out tacking speaking and listening skills by studying cards #10-15; they contain simple discussion and questioning strategies. You will find that they are great for different grade levels and pretty much any content area.  

40 Ways to Read Like a Detective: Supporting Text–Centered Inst

Email me if you would like to co-plan or collaborate using these resources!

~Chandra

Speaking and Listening Anchor Standard 1

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL1
Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

Last week, the 6-12 ELA Vertical Team met to discuss chapters from their book study on Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives.  We started by discussing the instructional implications of Speaking and Listening Anchor Standard 1:

• Students need time every day, in every class, to practice their collaborative conversations.
• Students will need to be held accountable for those interactions.
• It is important to provide students with instruction on how to engage in a collaborative conversation.
• Provide students with Sentence Starters
• Have students develop Rules of Conversation

Later we tried out two speaking and listening activities.  Try these in your classroom to build students up towards mastery of that first S&L anchor standard:

Facts in Five 

1. Have students individually generate a personal list of the five most important concepts or facts they have learned about the topic being studied or a list of five predictions, concerns, or areas of interest related to their learning.
2. Have student move into groups of five.
3. Have the group reach consensus on the five most important facts or concepts and clarify their rationale for selecting each.
4. Have each group present their selections and the rationale for each selection to the larger group.
5. Lead a discussion about the content identified, the similarities and differences and the process.
6. Post the choices on the bulletin board for later examination.

Another version of this activity is the 1-3-6 Protocol.

Inside-Outside Circle

It is a Kagan structure summarizing technique that gets students up and moving.  It provides a way to get students who normally would not talk to interact with others.

1. After students read a section of text, the teacher divides the group into two concentric circles containing the same number of students.  Students in the inside circle face a partner standing in the outside circle.
2. Students from the inside circle share something with their partner.
3. Students then reverse their role.
4. The teacher controls the timing, e.g. "Outside circle, it's your turn to share for one minute."
5. The inside circle needs to rotate and the students turn to face their new partner and share.

Inside-Outside Circle engages all students simultaneously and allows the teacher to increase or decrease the number of different pairings that occur. 

~Chandra

CNN Student News

CNN Student News is a ten-minute, commercial-free, daily news program designed for middle and high school classes.  The show, along with its curriculum found on the companion website, offer an easy way to address Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards for secondary students.  Transcripts are also available, which can be used to promote reading comprehension.

The "Daily Curriculum" includes:
Key Concepts--highlight topics that students will hear in each day's news
Fast Facts Questions--assess what facts students have gathered and how well they were listening or reading
Discussion Questions--designed to promote critical thinking and written
Media Literacy Question of the Day--help student examine media messages and their delivery

Below is an image of today's (March 10, 2014) Daily Curriculum .  <--Click the link to get to live site.

Teachers can sign up for their free Daily Email, which offers information on the major stories CNN Student News will cover that day.  Remember that CNN Student News is a news program that presents current events and issues in the world.  It is strongly advised that you preview each program before showing students, as you are the best judge of the appropriateness of its news content for your specific class.

~Chandra

"Turn to your partner..."

I will close out the month with another post to encourage academic discourse in classes.  I have talked about the benefits of turn and talk, embedded a video of it in action, and provided sentence starters so you can try them in your own classes. (Shout out to Mrs. Watson and Mrs. Phillips at NAMS for making and hanging posters of the sentence starters from last week!)  Now, I want you to think about fostering an environment that promotes quality discussions.  For example, when students physically move their desks to a circle shape, they are more apt to go deeper with discussion and begin to take ownership of the talking task.  Having students sit "knees to knees" when in partner talk time does the same thing.  Here are some ideas:

• If you are a teacher who has always had students sitting in rows, I challenge you to move the individual desks to pods of 3-4 students or at least pairs.  I know the high school has new furniture that was made for collaboration and not isolation!
• Take some time to model what partner talk should look like.  Using a student volunteer, have the class analyze posture and position.  It will help them to really understand why you want them to sit a certain way.

Here is a video that highlights the importance of position and also shows how partner talk can help students talk difficult tasks.  The students in this video are analyzing historical documents.

Vocabulary In Action

Literacy does not only deal with written words, but also spoken words.  It is important for students to be able to recognize the important vocabulary words when they encounter them in their texts, but students should also understand how to use the words properly in conversation.  Being able to use the vocabulary words in conversation allows for a greater and deeper understanding of the words, which will translate into a greater understanding of the overall text.


Keep vocabulary instruction to about 10 words per week; then attack 2 terms per day.  Here is a guideline for choosing appropriate terms:

• Important, critical content words from the reading
• Useful words, meaning they are transferable to other content areas
• Difficult words

There are many strategies for teaching vocabulary, but to get students to use vocabulary properly, challenge them to be a Word Wizard.  This post-reading activity is highlighted in Strategies for Building Academic Vocabulary in Social Studies by Christine Dugan.  

1. Choose both specialized content and general academic words.
2. Create a Word Wizard chart.
3. Explain that you want to record how many times they see, hear, or use a focus word.  Students will have to report where they saw the word and how it was used.
4. As an incentive, assign points based on where and how the word is used.
5. Occasionally, you may want to frame the activity by asking students to find a particular word in a specific place like an advertisement, newspaper, or novel.
6. As students return with evidence of their word use, set aside time to discuss their examples.  These discussions can be whole group, but also allow time to discuss in pairs and/or small groups.

If you need more information on the Word Wizard activity, click here.  

This is also a look at how you can differentiate this activity.

~Walker Smith, AHS Social Studies Teacher