Academic conversations

Zweirs, J., & Crawford, M. (2011). Academic conversations: Classroom talk that fosters critical thinking and content understandings. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.

Background

The authors had observed many classrooms where ‘best practices’ were being used. Many of the students were speaking and contributing to the lessons but they also noticed that, in many cases, there were groups of students who seldom took part. These were often the students who most needed to practise talk. Moreover, some of the talk that did take place was not ‘academic talk’, i.e. was not a vehicle through which students could learn. They believed this might have been due to the ubiquitous ‘trivial pursuits’ approach to learning in which students were encouraged to learn masses of disconnected facts.

Aims

The aim of the book is to help educators develop the skills to prepare students to talk in academic ways, to teach content understanding through conversation, to help students understand how they think, to use conversation as part of assessment, to develop student independence and to prepare students for the world outside school.

Sample

The book includes many examples of conversations between students. However, there are no references for the source of the conversations. It is possible that these are actually manufactured ‘model conversations’ of the type mentioned on page 183 of the book.

Method

The authors suggest three simple activities to help develop conversation: think-pair-share, small groups and student use of stems and frames in their responses. They believe that conversation is important for the development of literacy, cognitive skills and content learning, and social, cultural and psychological development.

Findings

The authors identify five core skills:

1. Elaborate and clarify

2. Support ideas with examples

3. Build on and/or challenge a partner’s idea

4. Paraphrase

5. Synthesize conversation points

They provide ‘frames’ for prompting the skills and for student responses together with lesson activities that help teach the skills. They also list seven features of effective conversation tasks such as they should require both partners to talk and practise critical and creative thinking. They show how these considerations apply in varied form across the language arts, history and science subject areas.

Implications

Teachers need to teach students how to take part in ‘academic conversations’ so that they learn not only subject content but also the associated thinking and language skills that will prepare them for life outside school.

Book available at READ@Academy on the AST campus.