Group Discussion

Sometimes I wonder how it is that students can talk for hours about Pokemon and Minecraft, but find it impossible to talk about something that's actually, you know, educational. One thing I tried to do more this past year was explicitly teach students how to have discussions in class, instead of just talking directly to me.

In the past, I've talked about making eye contact and facing the speaker, but the students really needed more instruction. During a presentation last year from the Nature Museum, we talked about giving the students sentence starters for conversation. I took sentence strips and wrote out a few, like "I agree with…and would like to add…" and "I disagree with…because…".  We started out with these written on index cards and students fish-bowling a conversation (having a few students sit in the middle of a circle while the rest watched) with the cards in their hands. After some practice, students were able to use them on their own. Voila, discussions in class. Some of the time.

Something I want to try this year is assessing these conversations, especially with the Common Core speaking and listening standards. This idea came from another great presentation, this one from Jaime Bailey at BER. She discussed how to use a scoring checklist while listening to group conversations, to help you assess how students are doing and so that they know exactly what you expect. I simplified it for fourth graders, and so that I could fit four checklists on a page and not have to flip through papers while listening. Because we all know that all those papers would end up on the floor. You can grab a copy here.

I'd start off by going over this checklist as a class and having students model both good discussion techniques and poor ones. Especially since I already know quite a few students who would be excellent models of inattentive conversationalists. I'd then have a few students meet in a group to discuss an article while we grade them together. It would probably be easier to do this at first in small groups discussing a short piece of text, like a Scholastic article, and then eventually reaching my ultimate goal: using these for literature circles.