Part One, Partnership Talk & Collaborative Conversations | The Listening Part of Conversation: Inquiry
“The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.”
These wise words were shared with me by my principal when she stepped into my classroom, and I was the only one talking.
It’s true — many of us vocalize our thinking (i.e. “I’m just going to think my thoughts out loud for a moment”), while others process internally. Either way, we’re often ‘having a conversation’ — outwardly or in our minds. All of us process, react, question, confirm, challenge, critique, and THINK through our conversations.
If conversations are an important part of the thinking process we use as adults, then the students we teach are no different. So, in our teaching, are we reflecting how much time we spend talking, versus how much the students are talking?
Sure, collaborative conversations are part of the common core standards, but do we really need the standards to drive what we all know to be instinctively true? Conversations are important, and the ways in which we use conversations as a tool to process and push our thinking across the curriculum are equally important, too.
Perhaps without realizing it, we end up being the ones who are doing all the thinking — robbing students of the chance to take an active role in their own learning and decision-making process.
Before we jump into a few tools you can take to your classroom, let’s pause here and think through a few of our values and core beliefs that led you to click on this post in the first place.
You’re reading this because…
You value student engagement, independence, and autonomy
You value student voice and choice
You view learning as a process of thinking
You’re working to build a community that centers student identity
You have committed time and teaching of emotional intelligence, mindset, and soft skills throughout the curriculum you have created
And let’s also be very clear on what we mean by collaborative conversations by naming a few things they are not…
A call and response where teachers are eliciting answers from students who are raising their hands and speaking one at a time
Round robin, choral, or popcorn reading of a shared text
Instead, let’s agree that they are…
Student-centered and student-led. Students select the topic they want to discuss and navigate how they are going to discuss it
An opportunity for students to rehearse self-regulation, independence, autonomy, and soft skills of teamwork, turn-taking, active listening
An opportunity for teachers to model and coach why, what, and how conversations ebb and flow as a tool for thinking
An opportunity for teachers to collect informal, observational data linked to student thinking (which is often invisible)
An opportunity to build community and connection – an everyday application of social and emotional learning
Whether you are “clean slating” it and looking to reboot the routines and rituals around collaborative conversation, or looking to focus your own professional goals, we hope you can take the following ideas and make them your own.
This is part one of a two-part series on Partnership Talk & Collaborative Conversation, and here is the second part - The Speaking Part of the Conversation, A Road Map for Collaboration.
Launching Into Partnership Talk & Collaborative Conversation
One element of collaboration is attentive, engaged, and active listening. When I join teachers who are looking at this in their professional study, we often engineer a co-authored experience with students by launching an inquiry for them to consider.
Some questions we pose are:
How do you know you’re being heard? Listened to?
What does it feel like to be heard? Listened to?
Once we launch the inquiry (you can write your own version of the question on a chart so that students have a visual reminder), we give students a few quiet moments to think and process independently.
Next, we ask students to pair with a peer who will serve as their thinking partner during this inquiry. We model, if needed, how to turn to a partner, face them, look in their eyes, smile, and start a conversation.
From that point, the role of the educator is to travel from partnership to partnership, simply LOOKING and LISTENING to what students are saying and how they are saying.
We highly recommend jotting what you notice in a “class at a glance” note-taking grid such as the one pictured below. This note-taking form is a sample from Teacher’s Toolkit for Independent Reading, a resource I co-authored with my bestie and colleague, Gravity Goldberg. Borrow this one, or create one on your own that matches your goal and style.
Applying Collaborative Conversation in a Group Context & Establishing Agreements
This next part is key if you are shifting from a more traditional, “Call and Respond” model of engagement. After you give students 2-3 minutes of discussion in partnerships, call them back together as a whole group.
Instead of asking students to share out loud, summarize by making a list and adding items to the chart. The goal of this inquiry is to decrease the amount of teacher talk and increase the amount of student talk through collaborative partnerships.
Things to typically discuss with students in their partnerships include:
Taking turns - one person speaks at a time
Looking each other in the eye
Leaning in and listening with “whole body listening”
Giving feedback through a gesture (such as a thumbs up), nodding their head, smiling (especially smiling with our eyes while wearing masks during the time of Covid-19).
After creating a list such as the one listed above, you can ask students to all agree and commit to practicing and commit with a verbal, “yes” a thumbs up, or maybe even signing their signature on the chart that was co-authored as a symbol of their commitment. To add a visual element to this tool, consider taking photos of students from your classroom community applying each of these agreements in their daily conversations. Refer to the visual tool while you’re coaching students or modeling for students strategies for successful conversations.
Creating a Rehearsal Space for Collaborative Conversation
Once the class agreements have been established, our job as teachers is to provide opportunities for students to rehearse and apply these agreements. In literacy, a natural place for students to rehearse their collaborative conversations is during an interactive read-aloud.
Check out more about thinking during read alouds here.
A second opportunity for students to rehearse their listening skills is during independent reading. Give students 2-3 minutes to discuss their thinking of the books they’ve selected to read as independent readers.
Because students are sharing books that may be different from one another, you can set them up to share their thinking about the book, rather than the book itself.
For example, you can model and coach how to discuss:
Book Choice: “What book did you choose and why?”
Reading Goals: We touch on how to establish strategic reading goals in this blog post.
Read and React: “Which parts of the text caused you to react?”
A Powerful Image: “Which parts of the text had images that stuck out to you? “
A third opportunity for students to rehearse and apply their collaborative conversations is throughout their entire day.
Wrapping it up
Imagine if the entire school community was working on this together?
Imagine if cafeteria staff, office staff, crossing guards, counselors, ALL educators were aware of the goals students are working towards in their collaborative conversations and it served as a throughline across the entire school community?
To summarize, you can start from scratch or refresh your goals around partnership talk and collaborative conversation by…
Establishing your values as an educator, getting clear on what collaborative conversations are, and what they are not;
Launching into inquiry by asking students if they feel they are being heard and listened to;
Pairing students with a thinking partner to process this question. Model, if needed, how to turn to a partner, face them, look in their eyes, smile, and start a conversation;
LOOKING and LISTENING to what students are saying and how they are saying.
Applying the inquiry to a classroom/group context;
Creating rehearsal spaces for ongoing practice.
Let us know how it goes in your classroom, and when you’re ready here’s Part Two, the Speaking Part of Conversations.
