Be Patient

The main types of talk I see occurring in my first grade classroom are I-R-E and book talks. Usually I-R-E is used during math lessons because the teacher is more focused on looking for a right or wrong answer, and book talks occur while we read from the students’ language arts textbooks when the teacher is looking to make connections to readers’ emotions and outside experiences. The book talks though, generally include my CT as the facilitator and inquirer while the students make the responses—sometimes my CT evaluates but she usually just allows students to answer or share without making any judgments. Unfortunately, really deep and meaningful discussions do not take place all that often though because, like the Triplett article stated, most book discussions are being abandoned due to the lack of time in the district’s curriculum—they are more focused on phonics first and comprehension second (64). I feel that my CT tries to incorporate discussion when she can, but there is a lot of pressure from her principal to bring students’ reading levels up and to spend more time on actually being able to read the text rather than discuss what they are reading about. I find this unfortunate because I feel that right now some of the kids are not motivated to learn how to read, but if they spent time discussing and connecting their readings to things that they find interesting in their lives then I feel their motivation and subsequently their learning would increase immensely.


In order for the children in my classroom to begin having these different ‘talks’ though, I feel that quite a bit of scaffolding would be needed. I liked the suggestions that people brought up in class today about modeling what a good or bad discussion would look like or even starting off by practicing discussions in small groups before moving to whole-class discussions. I think the main thing that I would see the students in my classroom having trouble with would be staying focused and on-topic. It would be important to remind them to stay on task and perhaps even having a central question or theme written on the board to remind them while we discussed. In addition, I feel like my students would need to be taught to listen to one another. Right now they are very self-focused and tend only to worry about their own thoughts or ideas. Therefore, modeling and explicit direction of building off of each other’s ideas would be very important. I think it is really important to remember though that students who have great discussions did not learn these skills overnight. It took time and patience from both themselves and their teachers in order to really understand and learn how to have a meaningful discussion, so I hope that we are able to keep that in mind and not get frustrated as we attempt to initiate discussion and talk in our own classrooms. Be patient...