I have written quite a big about Learner Agency and enjoyed adding to my knowledge when I read the following article:
Teaching Strategies That Cultivate Learner Agency, by Paul Emerich France.
In this post I want to share key points from the article and ideas that some of my colleagues have synthesized from the article.
The productive hum of students engaged in talking and learning is like hearing a symphony, a favorite song. They are evidence of a teacher intentionally planning for and developing the expectations and strategies of effective talk with their students.
“Children’s speaking and listening lead the way for their reading and writing skills, and together these language skills are the primary tools of the mind for all future learning.” – Roskos, Tabors, & Lenhart, 2009
Increased effective discourse between students leads to deeper learning.
“According to John Hattie (2018), teachers can ask between 200 and 300 questions a day – whereas students typically ask clarification questions. Research also indicates that teachers should limit their speaking to 20-30% of the class time and the student talk time should be around 80%.” – Greenwood
According to Hattie’s meta-analysis, classroom discussion has an effect size of .82 which is more than twice the average growth in a year! When students talk together, their relationships strengthen, their oral language skills grow, they see each other’s strengths and feel an increasing sense of belonging, and engagement increases! Today I want to bring together some rich resources on classroom discourse, to support the ways that teachers scaffold increasingly complex student talk in their classrooms.
Continue reading “The Importance of Effective Classroom Talk”
In my last post, I wrote about how to listen to Focus Students to reflect on and improve teaching practices. Who is better to inform teaching than the achievers in front of us, especially the quieter students and students from formerly marginalized groups? This weekend I started reading Liz Kleinrock’s Start Here, Start Now after a colleague recommended the text. I am already seeing many connections to the Focus Student process. I know there is much much more to the text, however, in this post I will briefly address connections to the Focus Student process.
The Opportunity Myth has been the foundation at several workshops I’ve attended. The past several weeks, my staff has started studying the research findings in connection to priority standards and identity work. I highly recommend reading the report, rereading the report, and connecting the report to other professional learning topics. In this post, I want to summarize some of the themes I’ve gleaned from reading.