Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/458422
C O U R T E S Y P H O T O between our students' actual academic conversation skills a n d w h a t we wo u l d i d e a l ly like our students to be able to do when conversing with one another. As a collaborative team, we defined that gap as our students' need to develop foundational commu- nication skills such as facing one another, making eye contact, and taking turns in order to engage in conver- sations about academic topics where ideas are shared, co-created and critiqued respectfully. Our examples The two examples that follow illus- trate how the collaborative nature of the Lesson Study process allowed our vertically aligned team to develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the Common Core speaking and listening standards. By collaborating across grade levels, we discovered that before our stu- dents could effectively synthesize conversation points or paraphrase or even elaborate and clarify, they required the explicit teaching of social skills — school-based respectful conversation norms like greeting one another and making eye contact — in order to fully access the value of academic conversation. This process allowed our team to discover which skills our children needed in order to converse well in an academic context. That is, just as the Common Core speaking and listening standards were suggesting particular skills that our students needed to learn, our own independent Lesson Study research revealed that following agreed-upon rules for discussions, building on others' talk in conversations, asking questions to check for understanding, and posing and responding to questions for clari- fication were precisely the skills that we needed to teach. Example 1: "Working together" guidelines Our team sought to prepare students to work in a group setting while learning from one another by teaching them the skill of paraphrasing. Knowing that para- phrasing "reflects content back to the speaker for further consideration and connects that response to the flow of discourse emerging within the group," our team reasoned that this skill would allow our children greater access to collaborative conversations. The findings from our paraphrasing research lessons, though, showed us that our students' abilities to "reflect content back to the speaker," for example, were hampered by the need to develop more basic skills in conversational norms. In other words, we found that a gap existed between our students' founda- tional conversation skills and the expectations of academic talk that required paraphrasing. As a result of these findings, our team implemented commu- nity norms or "working together" guidelines for partner talk in grades 2, 3, and 4/5 classrooms that focused on both the practice of and the reasons for using skills that are routinely employed in kindergarten classrooms — turning to face one's partner, using one's partner's name, acknowledging one's partner's contributions to a conversation through words of thanks, etc. The Lesson Study team consists of Robert Sautter, Emily Law, Jake Harris, Viridiana Sanchez and Brett Fox. Learning 47 V O L U M E 1 9 I S S U E 6