Talon Talk
Where Your Mind, Body, and Heart Can Soar!
HMS Amazing Race Business Participant - Healing Hearts of Waukesha - "Adopt a Child" information below. Our HMS community (individual teachers and/or classrooms) can work together to help these children!
Ongoing Discussion Strategies
Below are three different strategies to use in classrooms in order to encourage ongoing student-led discussions. When you try out one or more of these strategies, please share with others in your PLC in order to continue to "teach these strategies forward."
From: Cult of Pedagogy
One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we’re limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can “discuss” a topic from 3pm until bedtime—asynchronously—each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.
Backchannel Discussions
Talk Moves/Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person’s argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.