Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Allie Hughes
Part 1:
1. Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Rothenberg, C. (2008). Content-Area Conversations: How to
Plan Discussion-Based Lessons for Diverse Language Learners. . Alexandria, VA:
ASCD.
2.
Content-Area Conversations: How to Plan Discussion-Based Lessons for
Diverse Language Learners discusses many different activities to promote healthy
discussions in the classroom. The book starts from identifying exactly why
classroom talk is important and moves into how to promote a healthy space to
foster academic talk. Fisher, Frey, and Rothenberg identify the talk in an average
classroom and the differences in students that may affect how a discussion will take
place. After analyzing a variety of factors that work with classroom discussions, the
authors describe many different procedures and assessments that promote
classroom discussions. With my TESOL minor, while reading this book I often
thought of how this would work in an ESL classroom. I thought that a lot of the
ideas, activities, and preparations would work extremely well in a diverse classroom
of speakers. Currently, I do not have a high ESL population in my internship class,
but I do have a diverse group of students. The authors list a couple of ways to set
up a classroom conversation. They start from the preparations or Setting the
Stage. Afterwards, the discussion of what to do if no one talks and how to make
sure that student talk is productive is discussed. All of the strategies listed in the
book are useless if the discussion isnt productive or if the students arent making
progress. The idea of repetition and scaffolded instruction is heavily highlighted
because that is how students will begin to engage in these sophisticated
discussions. The skills in this book can be taught and exhibited in my own classroom
and that is why I truly enjoyed reading this novel. Every page was full of many
activities that could work or be slightly altered to work in any classroom, whether
there are diverse language learners or not.
Since this book heavily focuses on classroom conversations for diverse
learners, it directly relates to my dialogic teaching stance. Discussions are great in
classrooms if they are run successfully. This book provides ideas on many different
conversational activities that can work within a classroom. WHile reading it, I was
unaware of how many activities I have already done from this novel and also how
much I began doing without even noticing. The basic ideas of assessments,
classroom management, and student-talk all fit into my teaching stance. Most of the
ideas presented in this novel are there to help with English Language Learners. THis
is great because so many classes now a days have ELLs in the discussions.
3.
Promoting Talk Through Visual Support
I have learned that simply talking about how classroom conversations should be
does not directly help students. After spending a lot of time in a 9th and 10th grade
classroom, I have come to the realization that many students are visual learners.
Reading this book has supported my ideas. The authors discuss that posting visuals
in the classroom that support and reflect the current learning, key concepts, and
vocabs can positively assist the conversations in the class. Students will always
have something to look back to while small or large group discussions are taking
place. Adding sentence structures and starters throughout the room will help ELLs
to gather and present their thoughts in an educational manner. Another thing I
really enjoyed reading about was seating chart arrangements. As teachers, we
should be arranging our seats that promotes student talk and incorporating flexible
seating arrangements. Students should be facing each other in order to directly
promote this kind of classroom talk.
Part 2:
# of Days 1
Prior Knowledge Students will already know some rhetorical devices and
have analyzed a speech for these devices
10 min Small group Inside Outside Students will help move the desks
Circles out of the way.
Number the students into two
groups, 1 & 2
Students will form two circles.
- Ones on the inside and
twos on the outside
Students will present their
information from the journal, listen to
their partners, and then ask
questions.
5 min Katy Perry video & directions Show the Firework music video and
ask students to follow along on their
worksheet to the lyrics.
- Remind students to
start listening for rhetorical
devices
20 min Individual and group work - Students will first work individually
and identify the rhetorical devices
- After 5-10 minutes, students will
turn to people around them and
discuss what they found
- Students must answer the
questions WHY?
- Present sentence starters in the
front of the board, Katy Perry used
_____ to promote _____
Katy Perry used ________ in this
section of her song because______
The rhetorical device of _______ is
used often in Katy Perrys song
because she was hoping to achieve
_______
In the novel, the authors present Inside/Outside Circles. This strategy requires
student movement, student discussion, and thinking through multiple
conversations. I decided to try this in my lesson as an opening to a larger lesson. I
hoped that by inviting students to talk with their peers in the class would assist
them in group discussions later on in the lesson. Providing students with a way to
talk to a variety of students on varying discussion topics would help promote a
healthy conversational classroom. The novel suggests that a teacher poses a
question to the students and gives students time to answer the question in their
partners. I slightly altered this and gave the students their questions in the journal
prompt and had them write their answers on a notecard. I hoped that this would
provide students with more to talk about and have something to go back to if the
conversation was dying out before the allotted time. For the time provided, students
were to talk about their favorite songs, genre, artists, and why.
I believe that it went fairly well. I think that some students were still off task towards
the end of the time. I think when I do this activity again, I will use a set timer in
front of the classroom. Rather than me being the timer for the students, they will
have something to look up to during their conversations. The positives truly
outweighed the negatives. Students did exceptionally well throughout the rest of
the classroom conversations. Later on in the lesson plan, students had to talk to
other students around them about their song. I heard students shouting across the
room, remembering what song that person described to them, and helping them
identify rhetorical devices.