In this workshop, we address five core academic skills: elaborating and clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building on and challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing to improve your students' critical thinking and content understanding. This workshop is all about practical strategies that can be used immediately--less theory, more action—to increase the rigor of classroom academic talk.
Teachers using the academic conversations strategies will demonstrate high expectations for all students and will provide students skills to ensure their success in college and career after graduation.
You'll learn how to weave academic conversation skills into your current teaching strategies. Specifically, we'll describe how you can 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.
- Understanding of complex and abstract concepts like adaptation, human nature, human bias, conservation of mass, energy, gravity, irony, and democracy.
- A classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice engagement, and mutual support.
All participants will need a copy of Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford’s book, Academic Conversations, prior to the meeting date. Please check your school library or purchase from your favorite bookstore.
Prior to the course, you will receive an email that includes the Zoom link along with other important information.