Our third quarter focus is on speaking and listening, so I thought it might be interesting to dig around the internet and see what strategies looked intriguing.
In this three minute Teaching Channel video, Sarah Brown Wessling presents a quick discussion strategy that combines essential questions, student-lead discussion, and movement.
Students move during small group discussions to deepen their conversations. What makes it unique is that two students move on to share information with another group, while the other group members stay behind.
Students not only address the big question and present textual evidence-- they listen and record key pieces of the discussion to synthesize later on in the class period.
What I liked about this strategy:
- It is a great way to have students grapple with relating classroom texts to the essential questions. (Possible strategy for preparing students for the district writing assessment?)
- It gets all students engaged in speaking and listening. (I can see it being especially powerful for EL students.)
- It gets all students moving and outside of their comfort zone, but it doesn’t require the whole class to move. (Less chaos.)
- It fosters critical thinking and analysis, and students are building layers of understanding as they move from group to group and get new perspectives.
- It doesn’t produce paperwork to grade. A teacher can formatively assess while moving from group to group and listening.
Want details? Click on the picture or link above and see how Sarah does it.
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