- By using Productive Talk Moves effectively, you can improve the effectiveness of your classroom conversations.
- The goal of class discussions is for the teacher to facilitate student talk, not for the teacher to talk.
- Productive Talk Moves are designed to help you achieve this goal.
- For more info on Productive Talk Moves, check out the resources at the bottom of this tip.
- When you call on students, your goal is to have them respond to each other.
- Be careful not to respond to students yourself after you call on them. This is the perfect time to call on another student.
- This is a crucial part of productive class engagement.
- Below are the nine talk Productive Talk Moves to use while leading a discussion from Inquiry Project:
- Time to Think.
- Provide wait time or time for students to write down their answers before the discussion.
- Say More.
- Ask students to clarify what they just said, to say more.
- So Are You Saying…?
- Restate what you think the student said.
- Who can Rephrase or Repeat?
- Ensure that other students are listening and understanding by asking them to recite a recent point a student made.
- Ask for Evidence or Reasoning.
- Push students to explain why their answer is correct by forcing them to share their thinking outloud.
- Challenge or Counterexample.
- Have students think about exceptions or where their idea might be wrong or exceptions to their idea.
- Agree/Disagree and Why.
- Ask other students to take a position and defend it in response to a point an other students just made.
- Add On.
- Ask other students to provide more information, such as if there are multiple examples of a phenomenon.
- Doing this can get students to come up with a lot more examples.
- Explain What Someone Else Means.
- Ensure that students are not only listening, but also understanding their classmates.
- It’s important to ask well crafted open-ended question that lead to discussion and debate.
- Use open-ended questions rather than asking a question to which there could be one best answer.
- Asking a question that anticipate a single best answer is called IRE (Interrogation, Response, Evaluation) sometimes known as guess what’s in my head.
- Consider the following example questions that use Productive Talk Moves for an in-class discussion about efficiency:
- “We would agree that efficiency is good, but there are many debatable elements to efficiency.”
- “There are multiple kinds of efficiency. Which is best? Speed? Size?”
- “Can you ever maximize all kinds of efficiency?”
- “Does it even matter if code is efficient?”
- “What about less efficient code that is more readable?”
- Ask a question tangential to the course content to teach students how to have class discussion in a low-stakes context.
- Check out the Talk Science Primer for an easy to understand and free resource: http://inquiryproject.terc.edu/shared/pd/TalkScience_Primer.pdf
- Get more information on Productive Talk Moves, as well as videos demonstrating them, at http://inquiryproject.terc.edu/
- The Productive Talk Moves and the student engagement in inquiry are extremely appropriate to computer science at all levels.
- Though the videos and the project are aimed at 3rd to 5th grade science classes, they can be incredibly powerful in your classroom.
- Programming is a form of inquiry, as students test what the computer will do with their code.