Social Studies Middle School Guide

Canyons School District

Instructional Supports Department

STRUCTURED CLASSROOM DISCUSSION Effect Size 0.82 Implementation Tools

Structured Classroom Discussions are frequent and sustained, back and forth dialogues in which students 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. ● Intentionally planned discussions that target standards are essential for deep understanding of complex texts and academic content. ● Discussion allows for students to co-construct knowledge through interaction between reader and text, teacher and students, as well as student to student. ● Dialogue during reading includes the interaction between text and reader, but also the critical thinking and writing necessary to engage in the comparison, explication, reasoning, and contextualization of ideas, while increasing communicative competence. Academic Language is the formal words, phrases, sentences, and discourse features that students need to use and understand in order to succeed at academic tasks including content area specifc language needed to speak, listen, read, and write for academic purpose and audience. Building academic language is critical across ALL subject areas, and is included in the speaking and listening standards in ELA, the math practice standards, the science and technical subject literacy standards, the social studies literacy standards, and in world language standards.

Critical Actions for Educators ------------------------------- ● Create and teach norms for classroom discussions. ● Expect academic language during discussion. ● Set a clear purpose for discussion. ● Plan content (task/text context) that requires thinking demonstrated through class discussion ● Model and teach examples of academic language use and structures. ● Scaffold discussion by using structured discussion frames. ● Use prompts and cues content, recall critical points, elaborate, and construct meaning. ● Provide opportunities for verbal and written practice. ● Evaluate understanding and assess language use. ● Provide feedback with purposeful questions that check, build and deepen understanding. to help students engage in new

Participation Moves for Students

● Follow norms and expectations ● Come prepared for discussion ● Use discussion frames and language tools ● Listen to others with care in order to: ○ Pose and respond to questions

○ Elaborate, clarify, question and persuade ○ Draw conclusions ○ Support ideas with examples ○ Build on and/or respectfully challenge another’s idea ○ Paraphrase

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Synthesize discussion points