ELA Practice #5

If we want our students to be active participants in a diverse democracy, we’ll need to teach them not only to think for themselves but also to talk to one another. This guide is designed to support teachers as they help students build these skills by practicing critical conversations.

In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Dr. Lindsey Moses Guccione shares five key challenges related to the oral language development of ELLs, as well as tips for addressing each of the challenges.

This video introduces teachers to readers' theater which encourages a dramatic interpretation of literature. 

Parlay helps educators facilitate effective student-driven dialogue by giving every student a voice, encouraging deep engagement, and effortlessly tracking and assessing student participation.

Word Generation emphasizes 21st century learning goals, such as using academic language, developing an argument, reasoning analytically, reading to find evidence, reviewing data, discussing various perspectives, engaging in debate, and expressing well-reasoned positions in writing. Free sign-up required to access materials.

This Google Drive folder contains a variety of resources that support academically productive talk (discourse/discussion) in classrooms.

In this article, author Joelle Pederson explores the connection between types of teacher feedback on student writing and the subsequent revisions students choose to make.

This checklist enumerates four goals for productive discussions and nine talk moves to support discourse. 

The Right Question Institute offers resources on the Question Formulation Technique, which helps students develop better questions, including questions about texts.

This blog post by Jessica Cannata includes an explanation and purposes for using the Talking Points protocol for group discussions as well as a graphic that shows Talking Points categories.

For teachers looking for new ways to engage students in discussion, there are a variety of digital platforms that encourage student discourse, including Padlet, Figjam, Wakelet, VoiceThread, Socrative, and more.

In this blog post, Jennifer Gonzalez provides 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. For teachers who have struggled to find effective ways to develop students’ speaking and listening skills, this is an invaluable resource.

This article by Fisher and Frey provides standards-aligned strategies for developing collaborative classrooms.

This video includes ideas around what teachers can ask to encourage productive small- and whole-group discussions.