Download Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical

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.