This course offers strategies that can lead to richer, more productive, whole-class discussions in their classrooms. Focusing on how to prepare for discussion, this course is for anyone who leads, wants to lead, or is interested in how teachers lead discussion. Across the 4 sessions in this course, we’ll learn more about what teachers and students need to do to prepare for rich discussions, including understanding: 1. What is (and isn't) discussion, and why discussion is important 2. How teachers set goals for discussion, and establish explicit norms that support these objectives 3. How teachers select texts and prepare text-based questions to guide the conversation 4. How teachers – based on these goals, norms, texts, and questions – then prepare students for the whole-class discussion The course consists of short videos interspersed with various thinking tasks—such as reflecting on videos of classroom discussions in action, and designing and receiving peer feedback on aspects of a Discussion Plan, a plan for a discussion you’ll lead in your own classroom.
Preparing Texts
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Do curso por University of Pennsylvania
Orchestrating Whole Classroom Discussion
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Pam GrossmanDean and George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Lisa M. BarkerAssistant Professor
Towson University
Welcome to session three.
By now you have established your topic, texts, goals, and norms, and
in this session we'll explore two practices.
One, how teachers prepare the texts that will anchor a whole-class discussion.
And two,
how teachers go about devising text-based questions to guide the conversation.
Let's begin by unpacking the work teachers do to prepare the texts they've selected.
I'm going to walk you through how we think about preparing texts for
discussion, and then for the next task,
you'll be doing this work based on the texts you've selected.
You might want to pause the video here, and gather together the components of
the discussion plan you've designed so far, the topic text, goals and norms,
so that you can have access to these resources throughout this video lecture.
Take a moment to remind yourself of your goals for student learning.
Keeping these goals in mind will help serve as a lens for
rereading the texts you've selected.
As you reread do the following.
Read the text or texts first, not from from the lens of a teacher but
from the lens of a reader.
Consider where's the heat for you?
In other words where do you pause and re-read perhaps because there's
complex language or because you find a part of the text particularly compelling?
Where do you annotate the text by underlining rich passages or
by asking questions of the author or character?
Where do you find yourself making connections between the text and
other texts such as things you've read before or personal experiences?
Reading in this way will help you both empathize with the experience of students
who will be reading this text for the first time, and
help you begin anticipating where students themselves will have heat.
Meaning where they may get confused, encounter questions,
or experience an emotional response.
You may wish to pause the video here and read your text in this way.
Alternatively you can continue with the steps we're about to outline and
save this work for the task that will follow this video segment.
The second phase of text preparation involves taking a look back at
the annotations you made in step one as a reader, and now noting
as a teacher which moments of heat will help you prepare for the discussion.
As you review your annotations mark the passages or
excerpts that you anticipate may confuse students or inspire student questions.
For example,
as I'm reading a poem, I'm often trying to make sense of the title as I'm reading.
I might pause periodically and remind myself of the title of the poem, and
how the lines speak to this title.
So, as a teacher, I'd mark with a star the poem's title to remind myself
later that I might want to ask students a discussion question about the title.
Or instead of a poem, say I was reading one of Dr. Martin Luther King's speeches,
and I had underlined phrases that he repeats throughout his speech.
I'd want to star those repetitions to remind myself that that might make for
a useful starting point for a discussion question.
Third and finally, now that you've annotated the text and noted potential
starting points for discussion, let's take a moment to see what we can do in terms of
formating the text to make it more accessible to student readers.
For example, I know I will want students to be able to reference particular exerts
from my historical documents.
So since I have multiple documents, a timeline, a letter and
a speech, I would want to label these texts documents A B and C,
and mark these labels clearly at the top of each document.
This way students can easily say my evidence comes from document B and
all listeners would know to turn to that document in order
to read along with their peer.
It would also be important to include at the top or bottom of my documents key
historical information such as who wrote the document, when and for what outlet.
Since sourcing and contextualizing are key historical thinking skills,
it's important for students to have this info readily available.
If I were leading a discussion based on a poem,
I would want students to be able to quickly refer to a line number so
I would format the poem so that every fifth or so line had a number next to it.
And for longer texts like short stories,
I would number the pages to facilitate referencing.
Other formatting concerns include providing ample space
between lines and/or in the margins for students to be able to annotate the texts.
Now it's time for you in the next task to prepare your texts by reading and
annotating them through the lens of a student, reviewing your annotations
through the lens of a teacher, and formatting your text to facilitate
students' abilities to access, interact with, and reference the texts.
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