VaRiEtY is the Spice of Life

Today in my practicum I was able to see several different types of situations that called for different types of discourse. When I arrived, my practicum teacher informed me that she was not feeling well and had lost her voice. For the few hours that I was there she would tell me what she would like the class to do and I would simply repeat her words in a louder voice where everyone could hear. (It was so fun!!) The first discourse marker I used was raising my hand to show five fingers. This initiates the students and asks them without words to be quiet and return to their seats. I slowly would bring down each finger until by the time I had three fingers up the students where at their tables and looking at me waiting to hear what I had to say. I didn’t even have to say a thing!

We began our discussion by me asking, “Please get your homework from last night and discuss it amongst your groups. Make sure to remember your goals.” Ok.. I must admit I have no idea what their goals were I was just repeating what Mrs. L told me to say, but the students knew exactly what to do. They pulled out their homework and the conversations began as one student would initiate the conversation by reading what they had found. Rewind… sorry, their homework was to read an article about the North and the South during the Revolutionary War and do a venn diagram on the article, i.e so they organized the facts from the article in the diagram to compare and contrast the North and the South.

Ok so back to the discussion… The students began as one of the students would read their homework aloud, then another would fallow with, “I have that two but I also have this…” Then another student may say, “but doesn’t that really belong in the other one?” And the conversation would build on each other.

The time came for small group discussion to be over and Mrs. L raised her hand silently and in a short time all the students had their eyes on her, and were quietly waiting to hear what was next. She then asked me to have the students share how they did. Now I expected to hear things about the Revolutionary War; instead one student form every table stood up and gave a grade on a scale of 1-4 on how they think the conversation went. One is the worst and four is the best. The first student began and said, “I think our group should have a three, we met all of our goals and everyone added to the conversation, but I think we could work on sharing our opinions because some people had a hard time in the beginning.” Each table went on like this giving the conversation a grade and then saying what they did well as well and then how they could improve the experience next time. I was shocked at how honest and insightful the students were.

Now it was time to make a venn diagram for the entire class. Mrs. L would ask the students “What are some things you read about the North?” they then continued the activity in the I-R-E format until their venn diagram was complete. Mrs. L also used a lot of authentic question responses and guided the conversation to illuminate the economic implications of the war and how slavery was not necessarily only a moral issue but also an economic issue.

The next activity was a lesson on speaker tags and punctuating dialog, which I got to lead… it was awesome! We had the class gather on the carpet for a change of pace (its supposed to keep them engaged, I guess by sitting in one spot for a long periods of time, students begin to loose interest and are more prone to getting distracted.) Everyone brought their books and we read together the section on punctuating dialog. I restated it in my own words and then asked for questions. We then did an awesome activity that I will share in our wiki area but it involved dialogic classroom discourse in a creative way that worked beautifully.