Notes from Chalk Talk – Student Centered Classroom
What do students get out of engaging in protocols and collaborative work?
- Deeper understanding
- A variety of opinions on a topic
- More engagement in learning
- Clarification of misunderstanding
- A voice in the discussion
- Peers matter
- Take risks
- More time to learn
- Confidence
- Student centered
- They learn how to listen to others and respect different opinions
- Communication skills
- Personal connections
- A sense of community
- All are involved
- Learn about self as learner
Norms for effective student group work
- Why is discussion/language important
- Taking others ideas seriously
- Consider alternate viewpoints
- One person speaks at a time
- Listen to learn
- Disagree agreeably
- Build on each others’ ideas in a polite way
- Learn from everyone
- Add to your notes from…
- Anyone can be called on
- We all participate
- Stay on topic
- Quiet voices
- listen
- eye contact
- appropriate body language
- do your job
- be prepared** (student and teacher)
- take turns
- mutual respect
- individual accountability
- think and pause before answering
- everyone participates
- ask questions
- piggy-back
- allow for everyone to participate
- stay on topic
- all get to a result
- work as a team
Teacher Responsibilities for fostering effective group work:
- Start with classroom environment
- Establish an environment where discomfort for speaking in groups is minimized
- Watch behavior for calling on the student with the answer
- Continuously walk around the room
- Sit down with a group and listen, ask questions
- Determine whether groups need support
- Understanding students
- Preparation
- Modeling expectations
- And more prep
- Ensuring kids feel safe to respond
- Training students
- Assess progress on collaboration standards
- Making sure teacher is comfortable with technique
- Monitoring student involvement
- Fostering respect
- Knowing where students might have difficulty with the content
- Keep it interesting
- Having focus questions
- Show a timer
- Determining and communicating purpose
- Model
- Staying “out” – observing and knowing when to offer support
Classroom Management issues to think about for managing effective group work
- How to determine partners
- How to monitor noise
- Alternative assessment for off topic behavior
- Attention getting signal
- Engagement by all
- Learners who are working below grade level
- Classroom dynamics/learning skills
- Understanding individual students
- Time*
- Logistics/time
- Management of materials
- All on task
- Having norms established fro group work
- Helping kids work with diverse partners/groups
- What to do students who are unprepared
- What to do with students that doesn’t like group work/discussion
- Requesting help from the teacher
- Transitions
- How will you ensure all students are called on, include?
Characteristics of Effective Listening
- Writing down thoughts/reflections
- Making eye contact
- Contributing
- Paraphrasing
- Summarizing
- Authentic
- Listening because you care, not because you are supposed to
- Teaching someone else
- Facing each other
- Empathy
- Wanting to learn from someone else
- Mind on the speaker
- Being open to change own ideas/opinions
- Consider: are you thinking about what you are going to say or truly attending to the speaker?
- Allow for process/reflection time
- Understanding everyone can teach you something
Methods to establish norms in your classroom
- practice and discuss
- model
- fishbowl
- do them often
- cooperative between student and teacher
- whole class discussion
- checking for understanding
- explain reason for norms to students
- establish as a class
- model right and wrong ways
- time to revisit past discussion, ideas…
- post norms for reference-revisit often
- reflect
from workshop work packet page 15-16:
Methods for Establishing Classroom Norms
Version 1:
1.Start with what students know
2.Ask them to identify what good listenersand speakers do in a group discussion. In other words, how do you know:
- someone is being a good listener
- someone is being a good speaker
- what makes a good discussion
3.List these potential criteria
4.Have students watch a video of students or colleagues having a discussion, or participate in a live Fishbowl protocol, where the outside circle observes the listening and speakingbehaviors of the group in the inside circle
5.Revisit the list students generated earlier, and make changes, additions, or deletions
6.Generate a list of sentence and question starters for kids to have as areference (as a poster in the room, a reference sheet, or on smaller indextype cards connected on a metal ring or shower curtain hook)
Version 2:
- Ask students to think about the best group discussions they have been a part of and reflect on what made these discussions so satisfying
- Next, ask students to think about the worst group discussions in which they haveparticipated and reflect on what made these discussions so unsatisfactory
- For each of the positive characteristics identified, ask students to suggestthree things the group could do to ensure that these characteristics are present
- For each of the negative characteristics identified, ask students to suggestthree things the group could do to ensure that these characteristics are not present
- Use students’ suggestions to draft a set of ground rules to which you allagree, and distribute them in writing
- Periodically, ask the class to reflect on whether the ground rules established atthe beginning of the semester are working, and make adjustments as necessary.
(Adapted from Brookfield & Preskill, 2005)
Other suggestions:
- Use non academic topic to train your students
- Assign student to behave inappropriately
- Show tv clip with people acting inappropriately/ appropriately
- Show video of socratic seminar and debrief
- Do activity to show the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
Lost on the moon (appendix D)
Working together on activity like creating a story by yourself from bag of items or with everyone
Google Synergy activity
- Create anchor charts
The key is to assess, revisit, andhold students accountable
Quips or slogans to help students remember what effective behaviors are
- Pursue your hunch
- Justify
- Listen patiently
- Back it up with evidence
- Analyze and defend
- Respect everyone’s opinions
- Be kind
- Disagree agreeably
- remember core principles
- remember to LEP – listen, eye contact, participate
- do not impede the learning of others
- be appropriate
- No “I” in team
- Cool and warm statements
Pittsford Central Schools The Student Centered Classroom: Using Protocols to Deepen Student’s Knowledge Page 1