Encouraging Content Area Discussions

Students will learn more about a disciplinary topic when they are given the opportunity to discuss the new learnings in class.  According to the Vacca and Vacca article (located here), students need to be able to have student lead discussions in the classroom to help with comprehension.  They also state that many times, the teacher does more of the talking, which is not necessarily helping the students.  Due to this, it is important for teachers to encourage discussion around a topic.  I believe teachers can do this through scaffolding instruction on discussion as well as setting up an environment that is conductive of discussion.

The Vacca and Vacca article as mentioned above gives some tips to encourage discussion.  The first activity that is mentioned is scaffolding discussion through activities like turn and talk.  With the new Common Core Standards, we are even doing turn and talk in my Kindergarten classroom.  The article mentioned how many students will try to guess what is in the teacher’s head during discussion.  The turn and talk allows students to only speak to one other partner and not be put on the spot for any answers.  In my current classroom, we use the turn and talk as a way to discuss various topics and subject areas.  I find a lot of success with this type of classroom discussion because as I take anecdotal notes, I listen and see that every student in my classroom is partaking in the discussion.

I also found the Vacca and Vacca article had many beneficial tips for encouraging discussion as well.  Some of the tipcs that were included were arranging the classroom in a specific way, teaching students how to listen, and establishing goals for discussion.  I believe these are all aspects that can be taught at the younger grade levels, and build on as the students grow older and more versed in language.  I previously had not thought about how the way a classroom is set up and how that can help discussion.  Students should be able to see one another and have easy access to sit by one another for discussions.  In my room, I try to set it up so that students can simply turn in order to have a discussion.  I also found this packet online that gave a whole list of other activities that can promote classroom discussion.  I really liked reading about the picture making activity as I could see that working in a Kindergarten classroom to help facilitate their discussion on new learnings.

I think that between the article from Vacca and Vacca and from the article I found online, that students can learn how to discuss topics in the classroom. Students need to have ample opportunities for discussion to foster their growth and understanding in a topic.  I believe that if students start discussing content areas at a young age, they can only grow and become more inclined to learn from their discussions

Multiple Texts in a Kindergarten Classroom

Currently I am using multiple texts as a way to teach my Kindergarten students about the inquiry research projects about animals.  The students were expected to pick any animal that they wanted and they have to present 3 facts that they researched about their animal in the mode that they pick.  There were many formats of texts that I made available for my students but, before allowing the student to dive in I had to teach them how to read across the multiple texts.

Before beginning this unit with my students I worked with our librarian to ensure that students were able to access information about animals across various texts.  We decided to pick-

Easy informational readers like this

Pebble Go
YouTube videos

I was beyond excited that I was able to find all of these great readable sources for my Kindergartners and I could not wait to dive into the project with them.  I then had the realization and reminder that “wait, these students may not even know what to do with this information.”

After realizing that the students did not necessarily know how to read information to learn, I had had to take a step back.  I knew I needed to teach the students lessons and model how to read this text to learn new information.  I explicitly taught the students how to get information from the sources and record it to learn new information.  I had models and graphic organizers to help the students understand how to take information from the text and write it down.

I believe this is one of the first steps in teaching students how to synthesize information across multiple texts. Dr. Manderino talked about teaching students how to synthesize in his video located here.  I agree with him when he stated that students need to know how to synthesize and that we should not wait until the older grades to teach this skill. In order for this to work in my classroom, I had to frame this project to help the students understand the new information. I believe that even in Kindergarten students can be taught how to read for information to create a project.

Further in  the video, the Common Core Standards are discusses as well as the students having the ability to compare texts. I do not think that Kindergarten students are able to do any comparative evaluation other than saying “I got this information from this book and this information from this book.”  I do not think they are developmentally reading to compare these texts any further than that.  However, I would hope that the simple step of teaching to students realize what information came from which book will help students make deeper comparisons as they get older.

I would hope that as the students get older that they would be taught more strategies to understand these texts.  I found this PowerPoint from the National Center for Literacy Education that explained how multiple texts can be used in classrooms.  It was very similar to Dr. Manderino’s video that I referenced in the last video.  This PowerPoint also broke down the understanding of multiple texts and how they can be used in the older grades as well.