Instructional Playbook

Structured Classroom Discussions are frequent and sustained back and forth rigorous dialogues in which learners focus on an academic topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas to build new meaning using academic language (Zwiers & Crawford, 2011). Classroom discussion is vital for academic language development, comprehension, and critical thinking across all content areas. Academic Language is the formal words, phrases, sentences, and discourse features that learners need to use and understand in order to succeed at academic tasks, including content area specific language needed to W rite, S peak & listen, R ead & view, and for academic purposes and audiences. Structured Classroom Discussion

Click here for the Implementation Toolbox

Increase Your Impact

Maximize

Opportunities for students to process information and pre write in their home language in conjunction with English Sustained interactions between peers to enhance language skills Providing word banks, sentence frames, or graphic organizers that encourage the use of academic language Using prompts, routines, and gestures to help learners engage in new content, recall critical points, elaborate, and construct meaning Intentionally pairing/grouping learners using precision partnering guidelines to support sustained interactions Implementing partner or small group talk without setting a culture for rigorous discussions and establishing routines or expectations

Rigorous Discussions:

allows learners to co-construct knowledge through interaction between reader and text, teacher and learners, as well as learner to learner, occurs before, during, and after reading or viewing, allows students to engage in comparison, explanation, reasoning, and contextualization of ideas, while increasing communication skills, and allows for instruction to be chunked and provides time for learners to process information.

Minimize

Building academic language through rigorous discussions is critical across ALL subject areas, is good for ALL learners, and essential for multilingual learners and special populations.

Setting a Culture for Rigorous Discussions

Establish norms and expectations Hold learners accountable to expectations Plan scaffolds for language use/access during instruction Choose relevant topics for discussion Encourage diverse perspectives Provide time for students to have sustained interactions

Model and set expectations for active listening, respectful communication, and critical thinking skills, and consensus building during discussions Act as a facilitator, rather than leading the discussion Provide feedback Adjust as necessary

Effect Size: 0.82