Welcome back. This second session has two goals. First, we'll explore how teachers set goals for what skills, knowledge, and understandings students will acquire through whole-class discussion. And second, we'll take a look at various ways teachers can establish and communicate norms for discussion that align with these goals. Teachers have goals for both what they want students to learn through discussion and goals related to speaking and listening that support high quality discussions. For example, history teachers might engage students in a discussion of the Battle of Lexington to help them learn something about that event, or what it means to reason about history. English teachers might have students discuss Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, Kitchenette Building, to learn about concrete imagery, and how it conveys meaning. These goals relate to the specific content of the lesson. However, these same teachers also have goals for discussion. They might want students to learn specific discussions skills, such as how to build on each other's ideas or to express disagreement constructively, to improve the quality of these discussions. Diana Hess, a scholar who has investigated discussions in social studies, calls this the distinction between teaching with discussion and teaching for discussion. As teachers plan for a discussion, it's helpful for them to think through their goals around student learning of content, and their goals for what students can learn about engaging in productive discussions. The Common Core standards explicitly identify standards for students' ability to engage in collaborative discussions. So they offer a description of the kinds of skills teachers might target for their goals for student learning. Let's take a look at some of these skills. Here are a set of discussion skills that the Common Core identifies as important for 11th and 12th graders. The overall standard, which we saw earlier, requires students to be able to initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions. One-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led, with diverse partners on grades 11 and 12 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively. In order to achieve this standard, students will need opportunities to learn, first, how to prepare for discussions, which might include annotating texts, identifying key ideas, or preparing questions ahead of time. Students would also need opportunities to learn the implicit rules of an academic discussion, how to take turns, how to contribute an idea, how to cite evidence in support of their idea, and how to track the flow of ideas in a discussion. Students would also need opportunities to learn to ask follow-up questions, to agree or disagree respectfully with their peers, and to use that agreement or disagreement to move the conversation forward. There's obviously a lot to learn in order to help students successfully engage in productive discussions. The first step is identifying the specific skills you want your students to develop. And in order to do that, you first need to assess what your students already know about participating in effective discussions. In this next task, we want you to observe a group of eighth graders discussing The House on Mango Street. As you watch, we want you first to note what students are already able to do with regard to engaging in a collaborative discussion around a literary text. We've provided a checklist of some of the discussion skills appropriate for eighth graders to help organize your observation. We would then like you to identify the next steps for these students. Given what they are already able to do, which of these discussion skills would you target next?
