Saturday, November 16, 2013

Reaction to "Teaching Your Students How To Have A Conversation"

     Like them or not, I think it's rather telling that the Common Core State Standards include standards for speaking and listening. Logic would suggest that these standards were created because students show some deficiency in their ability to converse, at least in the traditional sense (texting, tweets, and status updates aside). While I certainly am an advocate of technology, I do buy into the notion that it has harmed students' conversation skills, as well as their ability to pick up on the subtleties of communication. There are probably other factors involved in this decline, but in this post at least, I'm not concerned with those. What I am concerned with is an excellent post from Allen Mendler on Edutopia.
     Mendler takes the time to illustrate several strategies aimed at coaching students through having both formal and informal conversations. While many of them seem elementary, it is truly amazing to consider their impact, especially in the "read/write/speak more" push in the Common Core. I had already implemented some of these prior to this posting, and have seen seismic shifts in the way that students communicate with each other during fishbowl discussions, as well as think-pair-shares. It's certainly a worthy read for anyone who says "why won't these kids just respect each other?" It's not that they won't, it's that sometimes, they just don't know how.

References:
Mendler, A. (2013, November 5). Teaching your students how to have a conversation. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teaching-your-students-conversation-allen-mendler

2 comments:

  1. Hey Randy,

    I thought the article you chose this week was extremely interesting and is something I would like to share with my students. I liked how you stated “it’s that sometimes, they just don’t know how” referring to responding or having a conversation. I think some of the blame goes to the use of so much technology, social media and texting when students have a real conversation they get confused on proper actions. The article suggest in one of its tips, “encourage turn taking”, I really like the idea of incorporating a talking stick to encourage students to respect one another and limit questions or comments to 1 student at a time. It think a modified version of that tip could come in handy within a middle school classroom environment. Thanks for sharing! - Chris

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  2. Thanks for sharing Randy! I saved this article because I thought it could be so helpful to my students. At the end of major projects, in my art classroom, the students participate in classroom critiques. Some of them really struggle with the concept of having a "conversation" about other students artwork. I think this article provides some great tips to help students successfully converse in a positive way. I plan to share this with my students prior to our next critique. Thanks again!

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