This week, we hosted relatives for a holiday meal, and I got thinking about the idea of orchestrating. To me, orchestrating means attending to various tasks simultaneously, with a big picture in mind. The cheesy potatoes might be a crowd pleaser, but managing the preparation of multiple dishes, serving courses, and entertaining a variety of guests are fundamental to the success of the affair. Teachers orchestrate on a daily basis!

This year, Nuestro Mundo Community School is working  with students on the speaking and listening standards through academic conversations. We have been using Fisher and Frey’s Indicators of Productive Group Work rubric as a guide to observe our tasks, student talk, and language supports. While things seem clear and linear in the rubric, I continue to be humbled by the orchestration necessary to pull it off. Last month, I described how we have worked to create a foundation for our students by establishing the norms of conversation.  Since then, we have been giving attention to teaching the actual skills of conversation.  Below are some insights from our experience.

What kind of talk do we hope to hear from students in their discussions? Fisher and Frey describe the the skill of argumentation as such: “Students use accountable talk to persuade, provide evidence, ask questions of one another, and disagree without being disagreeable.”  In his book, Jeff Zwiers outlines six skills of conversation helpful for students to engage in academic conversations that lead to this type of argumentation.  Our fourth grade teachers used the below visuals to present some skills of conversation to their students.

These anchor charts are really only as valuable as the teaching behind them! Our teachers have found value in choosing one skill to focus on over a period of time. We picked paraphrasing.  While paraphrasing might look different depending on the grade, we all saw the benefits of beginning with the skill of simply listening and repeating back to a classmate what was heard. Paraphrasing requires listening and respect. It’s a skill that can keep the cognitive demand low, since students are not asked to generate a new thought. This allows for more focus on the linguistic demand. As usual, language scaffolds can help. Teachers have been creative by making conversation placemats or table tents so sentence frames are more accessible to students.

Let’s see an example in action!  Below is an example of a small group discussion in Maestra Luz Celedon’s second grade dual language classroom. The students are discussing the author’s message of a story.

Click here to view the clip.

It is clear from the video that Maestra Luz has taught the norms of conversation, routines and protocols, and student accountability with her kids.  When reflecting on factors that led to this conversation, the teacher credited the collaborative activity she led prior to the discussion. In groups, kids used a blank alphabet grid to brainstorm the most powerful people or animals, each member of the group then recorded their thinking with a different colored pencil.

In this example and in others, creating a task for collaboration and conversation is a critical factor in setting students up for meaningful talk. Chapter 6 of Teaching for Biliteracy describes examples of tasks that do just this.  Activities like total physical response/adapted readers’ theatre, concept attainment, and word sort/sentence prompts also build background knowledge and formal language. While most of us are familiar with these ideas, they are easy to overlook or skip over planning the many pieces of learning.

Engaging in academic conversations requires social norms, knowing when to interject and how, having the language necessary to articulate one’s thinking, and finding the topic worthy of talk to begin with.  Orchestration of these skills in students is no small feat, for students and for teachers!

To readers: What ways have you developed the skills of conversation in your classrooms? What factors do you find especially critical in teaching speaking and listening standards to your students?