Very rarely have I seen the students in my class have a discussion-based lesson. In reference to Almasi, most of what I see is recitation style. After reading short stories, the students answer questions posed by the teacher that check for comprehension. Literacy lessons are more reading and writing based (worksheets, for example) than speaking based so whole class discussion is limited.
Last semester, however, we planned a "science talk" for the students, which generally follows the discussions Almasi refers to. Although the subject is science, many of the discussion principles can be applied to language arts. Since they are only in second grade and this task was new to them, we knew we had to scaffold. In small groups, each of us asked one very open-ended question. The activity served as a pre-assessment, which is why, as teachers, we chose the question, which follows the Instructional Conversational model. The students then discussed among themselves possible answers. We encouraged students to respond to each other to allow for a connected discussion by starting their statements with, "I agree, but…" or "I disagree, but…" Without this scaffolding for conversation structure, I don't know if the notion of the students talking with each other rather than with the teacher would have been as successful.
All of the students participated in the science talks, and each group's discussion was detailed and elicited thoughtful ideas. With this experience in their repertoire, the students can use the discussion techniques to construct meaning about the literature they read. After this experience as the evaluators, the students could be gradually introduced to being inquisitors and facilitators, provided some scaffolding just as before. Students will need to be told that questioning the text and being curious about it is acceptable since they are so used to answer right or wrong questions. Eventually these three roles can be combined to increase the quality of discourse in language arts.
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Rachel,
I loved how you related what we have learned about literacy discussions to the science talks that we facilitated last semester. I actually had a lot of questions about how we could incorporate a literacy discussion into our classroom, especially since the students have little to no experience with this type of activity. I think incorporating the "I agree" and "I disagree" type responses from science talks would be a great way to get students to warm up to the idea of a book discussion.
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