In a meeting yesterday, the 8th grade teachers were discussing progress on our SMART goal around academic conversations and changes we might make for next year. We wondered if more basic exercises could be created for a new crop of students next September. The purpose? To accustom students to three of the six core skills: elaborating, clarifying, and supporting with examples.
We agreed that students initially needed more help with listening than speaking. Typically, whether in classroom discussions, small group settings, or Socratic Seminars, students are too busy formulating their own thoughts to really listen to their peers. The notion that other students’ words might be a source for their own thoughts — in short, what they will say next — is often foreign to them. By looking at each speaker, nodding upon understanding, and being vigilant about another speakers’ use of words and logic (i.e. looking for holes in another speaker’s arguments), our students can improve their speaking and listening skills tenfold (though we’d settle for fivefold).
With this in mind, we brainstormed different ways to provide formative and summative feedback on listening and speaking (note the switch in order). One way would be to create a list of statements which lend themselves to further thought. As teachers, we are well-versed in demanding more when we hear vague language, broad statements, or unsubstantiated claims. The key is for students to become practiced in these listening skills.
So I typed two lists of simple sentences that might be uttered in a class discussion or written in a paper, whether the topic be a literary piece, a narrative paper, or a point of controversy. These can be used in more ways than one. I can read the sentence and cold call on students as a formative assessment of their listening skills.
Or, if the class has already practiced at great length, and I want to see what students have learned, I can take a page out of the Spanish and French teachers’ playbooks; I can give oral exams, where students show their knowledge by speaking. To do so, I can call students up to my desk one at a time while other students work at their desks. In this scenario, any ten sentences could be chosen to see how well students understand the need for elaboration, clarification, and/or support. Often, this skill means picking out a certain word or phrase in my sentence. It means speaking the language of academic conversation by listening.
In some cases, more than one response is acceptable. Thus, if I read the line, “Good teachers know what has to get done,” students might say, “Can you give specific examples of this?” or, “What do you mean by ‘what has to get done’?”
Also, if I believe one choice of response (support with examples) is truly stronger than the other (elaborate), I can give full credit for the former and partial for the latter. More likely, I can accept either response as legitimate.
To try this exercise with your students, they’ll need the Simplified Academic Conversation Prompts, which we have on the walls of our classrooms as giant posters (showing how much we value academic conversations — not only for speaking and listening, but as pre-writing and reading analysis tools). Here is a Teacher’s List of Statements with literary and personal narrative-style sentences, and here is a second List of Statements for AC Practice coming more from the province of argumentative thought.
Note that there are other roads into this practice. For writing, students could exchange papers and highlight sentences requiring elaboration, clarification, or examples. Then they could meet in pairs and share questions to each other’s work. Answers become the fodder of revision.
And on it goes. When it comes to speaking and listening, there’s no end to ways we can help students to think about their thinking through listening first and speaking second.
