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Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings Jeff Zwiers & Marie Crawford Authors and Bios Jeff Zwiers currently teaches in the Stanford Teacher Education Program and works as a clinical associate for Stanford's Center to Support Excellence in Teaching. He consults for international education development projects that promote bilingual education, curriculum development, formative assessment, and engaged learning. He has published articles and books on reading, thinking, and academic language such as Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms (2008). His most recent book, Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings, focuses on teaching students how to skillfully communicate and build content understandings within the classroom community. Marie Crawford is an assistant principal in the San Carlos School District. She is an experienced mentor teacher, classroom teacher, and museum educator. Summary of Book Learning is a social endeavor, and conversations, especially academic conversations, help students to deepen their understanding of a topic in a profound and meaningful way. Academic conversations are those back and forth dialogues that occur in a supportive and purposeful classroom environment. They help students focus on a topic and explore it, while building, challenging, and negotiating important ideas with their peers. Classroom talk and discussion is usually teacher-dominated. In fact, most classrooms spend less than two minutes per hour on classroom conversation or discussion. Most talk does not advance beyond short question and answer sessions because teachers have difficulty initiating and maintaining effective academic conversations in the classroom. There are five core communication skills that help students hold productive academic conversations across academic content areas. These skills include: elaborating and clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building and/or challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing. This book explains how to weave these skills into all teaching practices and approaches. Specifically, this book helps teachers to use conversations to build the following: •Academic vocabulary and grammar •Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application •Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing •Complex and abstract essential understandings in content areas such as adaptation, human nature, bias, conservation of mass, energy, gravity, irony, democracy, greed, and more •An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support This book includes practical, hands-on activities for working on each conversation skill, creating conversation tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess knowledge. Academic Conversations is an excellent resource for you as you help your students master the communicative expectations of today’s world. Amy Treece—Instructional Specialist (502)667-0063 [email protected] Talking with others is a powerful way to learn--and is a vital life skill. In Academic Conversations, students explore ideas and negotiate meanings to deepen understandings and connections. Academic Conversations focus on the development of five conversation skills across disciplines: Skill 1 - Elaborating, clarifying, and questioning Elaborating provides more important information about a topic or idea. The elaborator should predict the amount and detail of the information to be shared to make the point clear. Likewise, a listener should know when more information is needed. This often happens when a speaker introduces a general, complex, muddy, or abstract topic without much detail. For example, when a speaker says, "She was a very important person in that time period,” most adults would ask for elaboration or explanation, or asking why and how. For younger students, prompting for elaboration often simply means "tell me more about" which is fine because they are showing that they want to hear more. Two things then happen: they shift the focus from their own thoughts to show they are interested in what the partner has to say, and they get to hear more language.... Skill 2 - Supporting ideas with examples and evidence A student must learn to fortify an idea by supporting it. Examples, evidence, and logical reasons are the main ways to do this. We recommend starting with examples, of which we have identified four main types. The order is important here, because many students tend to jump straight to the examples from their own life and run out of time to talk about examples from texts or world, which tend to be more powerful and challenging. Encourage students to think of examples in the order below, at least initially. Along the way, train students to prompt partners to justify their examples—to explain why their example is a good example: "Tell me more how this example supports the idea of...." Skill 3 - Building on ideas You might have noticed that students often just "popcorn" out ideas, without connecting to the ideas of other students. Students need to learn to build on a partner's idea and/or appropriately challenge it. The co- in collaborate, cooperate, and co-construct means together. It means building up ideas, which is why we used the brick wall as a symbol in Figure 2.2. In a conversation, your next idea should build on, connect to, or logically challenge what your partner just said. Your idea should not be a random idea tossed out to smother or replace your partner’s idea. We must teach students to address, respect, and build from every single partner utterance. That is, no popcorning —or brick-piling.... Skill 4 - Paraphrasing Paraphrasing is the skill of keeping track of what we are hearing, organizing the speaker’s points, and describing what we understand in our own words. It requires some selection and inference. We “read” the speaker's tone and emphasis, and see what is important to them. This helps us select key points for our paraphrased version of what the speaker said. We also might highlight the points that relate most to the main topic of the conversation... Skill 5 - Synthesizing key ideas of the conversation Ideas, useful and not, float around while talking, and it takes skill and practice to keep track of them and combine the useful ones. Synthesizing conversation ideas means remembering, highlighting, and fitting together key points from the conversation into a coherent thought statement. It is the process of taking the many paraphrased chunks, mentioned in the previous section, fitting them together, weeding some out, and whittling them down into a shared conclusion... Developing these skills also helps students to fortify their academic language, critical thinking skills, content understandings, academic writing, and overall communication skills. Moreover, Academic Conversations are also powerful windows for assessing language, learning, and thinking. These are skills that keep on building students' language, literacy, and thinking.