Getting Kids Talking!

In AISI Cycle 5, Black Gold is working to enhance our students' disciplinary literacies -- that is, their abilities, attitudes, and skills that help them to navigate the disciplines, make meaning of content knowledge, and communicate critically within each disciplinary community.  Discussion skills are a critical part of being able to communicate ideas within a discipline. 

In my own grade 8 classroom, I would often set students off to small or whole group discussion.  Sometimes the discussions were invigorating and successful, and other times...well...not so invigorating.  Many of my students lacked the capacity to keep each other accountable to the conversation -- few were skilled question-askers, and even fewer felt comfortable dealing with difficult conversation.  When I decided I wanted to try discussion-based book clubs with these students, I knew something had to change.

Enter discussion skills.  Together as a class, we observed book club discussions in a fishbowl configuration and created discussion criteria based on what we observed.  Students came up with ideas they could use to deal with a group member who was off-task or shy, and also general expectations for discussion.  Although I suspected they might ignore these expectations, my students proved me so wrong.  This criteria essentially changed the way my students engaged in academic discussion because they actually used it.

*****

If you are interested in supporting your students to learn discussion skills, have a look at our three-part discussion skills framework.  The framework includes the climate criteria lesson I just described, as well as many fleshed-out lesson plans and resources for divisions 1 through 4.

By Terra Kaliszuk

terra.kaliszuk@blackgold.ca