Academic Conversations

Why Innovation in Technology?

(What is the purpose of the project? How does it fit into your classroom curriculum, school-wide tech initiative, etc?)

In order to help build academic conversation with our students, 41% of whom have IEPs, 31% of which have speech and language processing delays, our school has worked together to use the CAT tool to help guide our instruction on teaching elementary age students begin to have meaningful conversations where they listen to and build upon each other's ideas. This is a sophisticated skill that students need to practice in order to build on each other's learning and take on some of responsibility of learning.

For this year's technology project I decided to document the growth of my class' collaborative conversations. I wanted to begin by allowing the students to have non-academic collaborative conversations in order to give every student an opportunity to express themselves and practice their conversation skills in a fun, less restrictive way.

As we progressed, we began to incorporate academic language taught during instructional times as students became familiar with how to hold a collaborative conversation.

Growth of student academic conversation and student reflection of peer and personal conversations:

As my project evolved, I began to realize that the students themselves could use this tool as a way to help them self-assess their own conversations. After discussing "How to Have a Conversation," students view each other during collaborative conversations and give feedback on if they showed appropriate turn taking, stuck to the topic, and added additional information. The tool was also a way for me to assess if the students were comfortable using academic vocabulary and if they were using it correctly.