Instructional Conversations

   

Whenever I sit down with a group of students to discuss a story or a reading strategy, I am always hopeful for a thoughtful conversation where I go, "Wow! That was awesome!"  I want to leave feeling like we are all better readers and thinkers after the discussion than we were before.  However, I have realized that this feeling is rare and only come about with intensive planning and the right group of students.

     Although I have always thought about this when leading literacy discussions, we have recently been talking about and reading research on Instructional Conversations, and I realized that this strategy is something that I tend to work towards.  I've learned a lot about creating the right support for instructional conversations to succeed.  In Claude Goldenberg's article "Instructional Conversations: Promoting Comprehension Through Discussion" he discusses the importance of learning from conversations.  He writes, "But true education -real teaching- involves helping students think, reason, comprehend, and understand important ideas" (316).  And this doesn't come just because you sit down with a group of students and decide that you're going to have an instructional conversation.  It takes work and focus, flexibility and structure.

As I embarked on planning and implementing instructional conversations within my small groups, I realized that the thematic focus that you pick for the discussion is crucial to its success.  The focus can't be too vague, but it needs to be broad enough to allow for multiple perspectives and possible directions of conversation.  This is difficult to do because although you can try to pick topics or themes that you think your students will pounce on, it is hard to predict if they will actually absorb your theme into their discussion.  I noticed that when I incorporated literature or topics into the instructional conversation the students made thoughtful connections between past texts, past events, and from their personal lives.

From an unsuccessful attempt at an instructional conversation I learned that you truly need to plan and think through the lesson mentally before it happens.  If the students don't take to a subject or focus of the conversation, as the facilitator, you need to have a back up plan and be able to go with the natural direction of the conversation from the students.  The second time I implemented an instructional conversation into our small group the students fed off of the topic, fed off of each other and we had a really intellectual conversation that caught me be surprise.  I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised because the reason that the conversation evolved as it did was because of my planning and loose direction throughout.

I think that having an instructional conversation can make a lesson so much more meaningful for the students.  When they can share their personal ideas and work off of each other, the students are so much more engaged in intertwining the lesson into their schema.  It is a great strategy to find out students' background knowledge on issues in our world, their ideas on certain topics, and what they have learned in previous lessons.  It can be implemented into literacy lessons, science lesson, social studies lessons, and math lessons depending on your planning and focus that you develop ahead of time.  I think that instructional conversations are great to use in the classroom because they promote individual input from students, exposure to different perspectives, and can be a great platform for building a positive community of learners.

What do you think?

Thanks!
Kate

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