Academic Conversations
"Academic discussion helps all students to develop their reasoning, understand multiple perspectives, and deepen understanding of content." Nicole Knight, Oakland Unified School District's Executive Director of ELL and Multilingual Achievement Office.
Language plays an important role in the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. These standards describe the importance of students understanding the reasoning of others and engaging in meaningful conversation using evidence for claims. They expect students to collaborate, participate and engage in discourse and conversation with each other in building knowledge for all academic subjects.
In Academic Conversations (2011), Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford propose that academic discussions demonstrate the following characteristics:
- Purposeful and sustained conversations about content
- Anchored in grade-level texts and tasks
- Students work together to construct knowledge and negotiate meaning
- Students ask for clarification, clarify meaning, paraphrase, and build on or disagree with previous ideas
Academic Discussions are important for all students, but particularly for English Language Learners who benefit from:
- the opportunity to hear language in authentic and varied contexts.
- opportunities to produce language in contextualized and purposeful ways.
- redundancy of ideas and their related vocabulary.
Credits: Nichole Knight and the Oakland Unified School District, 2014 and The Teaching Channel
Five (5) PDUs or EUO credit available:
Objective(s):
- Participants will discuss the importance of developing academic discourse with their students (especially English language learners)
- Participants will select and implement research supported strategies designed to engage students in academic conversations
Explore:
- Read:
- Choose different articles from this site: https://ed.sc.gov/scdoe/assets/File/instruction/standards/ELA/Communication_6-8_03_23_2016.pdf
- Building Academic Conversation Skills in Every Lesson
- The information from Jeff Zwiers' website. Pay particular attention to the information under the Five Core Teaching Practices.
- View:
- The seven videos below from The Teaching Channel
- One or two of the student conversation videos located on Jeff Zwiers' website.
- Apply:
- Implement one of the strategies/activities described from the Read and/or View sections in your classroom (there are some great ones in the Tools section of Jeff's website, particularly the Constructive Conversations Skills Poster and Argument Balance Scale Visual Organizer)
- Reflect:
- Read Why Reflect? and Posting a Reflection
- Describe which strategy/activity you chose to try out in your classroom and the impact it had on instruction and learning. Did you experience any challenges? What will your next steps be?
- Summarize what you learned about academic conversations and the implications for your students, especially the English language learners, in relation to content comprehension, student engagement, and/or language acquisition.
- Post your reflection to the Discussion Group
- Rate:
- Refer to the details and link you received upon registration
Activities for Teaching and Developing Academic Conversations:
More resources: