Review of Talia's Group Article Analysis lesson

Talia used the discussion rubric in class during a series of lessons in which students uncovered facts about mining in the United States. The student outcome was a typed set of questions that could be used to interview a EPA official.

During the first lesson, students worked in groups to analyze different articles, pulling out important facts and ideas. Teacher monitored student progress and referred to the rubric to keep students on task and engaged. The stenographer's notes were photocopied and used later in the lesson to share out group findings. For homework, students used the skills they practiced in class to analyze a second article.

In class, students then took turns interviewing each other to gather facts about different articles. They used all of the compiled information to fill in a graphic organizer with facts about each of the topics determined relevant by the teacher prior to the mini-unit.

The final step was to use each fact that was collected as the basis for a question to be posed to the official. The students were encouraged to form an opinion based on each fact and then turn it into a question.

Talia's students completed most of the work within the week. Some needed additional time to formulate questions while others needed more time to type up their final questions.

Overall, the unit took 1 week and was deemed successful by the teacher.

Next, Kate has volunteered to provide a lesson that incorporates the discussion rubric.

Resources

"Student-generated Questions in Mathematics Teaching" by Colin Foster (Mathematics Teacher August 2011)

Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning by Courtney Cazden

Things Accomplished to Date

As a group, we have been working on improving classroom discourse in the mathematics and science classrooms. In the first two sessions of working together, we discussed what was working in classrooms and where we needed help. One way we decided to help ourselves see what students were discussing and how they were discussing it, was to create a rubric to monitor student discussion. After creating the rubric, we were each supposed to try it in class. While I think most of us did try it, we were not really sure how to work on moving students to higher levels on the rubric. Kristin tried using the notes to have students discuss questions that should be asked about packets. Melissa worked on monitoring student discussion through the use of sticker charts and sentence starters. Talia also used incentive charts to monitor vocabulary use. Kate used jigsaw discussions initially, seeing the importance of sentence starters and prompts in student-based discussions.