Audience: Grades 5-12
Five core communication skills to help students hold productive academic conversations across content areas.
(Book Bonus: specific lessons for ELA, Social Studies & Science)
Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings
Do you want your students to think and talk about your content at a deeper level and in lasting ways? Then join author Jeff Zwiers as he shares practical strategies teachers can immediately put to use. Through classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels, Jeff has identified five core communication skills to help students hold productive academic conversations across content areas. These skills are: elaborating and clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building on and /or challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing.
Jeff shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills into current teaching approaches. More specifically, he describes how to use conversations to build the following:
- Academic vocabulary and grammar
- Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation and application
- Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing
- Complex and abstract essential understandings in content areas such as adaptation, human nature, bias, conservation of mass, energy, gravity, irony, and democracy
- An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice engagement, and mutual support
Chapters on specifically planning and implementing Academic Conversations in Language Arts, History, and Science.
Participants will receive a copy of Jeff Zwier's book and lunch will be provided.