Skill1 - Elaborating, clarifying, and questioning

Elaborating provides more important information about a topic or idea. The elaborator should predict the amount and detail of the information to be shared to make the point clear. Likewise, a listener should know when more information is needed. This often happens when a speaker introduces a general, complex, muddy, or abstract topic without much detail. For example, when a speaker says, "She was a very important person in that time period,” most adults would ask for elaboration or explanation, or asking why and how. For younger students, prompting for elaboration often simply means "tell me more about" which is fine because they are showing that they want to hear more. Two things then happen: they shift the focus from their own thoughts to show they are interested in what the partner has to say, and they get to hear more language....

Skill 2 - Supporting ideas with examples and evidence

A student must learn to fortify an idea by supporting it. Examples, evidence, and logical reasons are the main ways to do this. We recommend starting with examples, of which we have identified four main types. The order is important here, because many students tend to jump straight to the examples from their own life and run out of time to talk about examples from texts or world, which tend to be more powerful and challenging. Encourage students to think of examples in the order below, at least initially. Along the way, train students to prompt partners to justify their examples—to explain why their example is a good example: "Tell me more how this example supports the idea of...."

Skill 3 - Building on ideas

You might have noticed that students often just "popcorn" out ideas, without connecting to the ideas of other students. Students need to learn to build on a partner's idea and/or appropriately challenge it. The co- in collaborate, cooperate, and co-construct means together. It means building up ideas, which is why we used the brick wall as a symbol in Figure 2.2. In a conversation, your next idea should build on, connect to, or logically challenge what your partner just said. Your idea should not be a random idea tossed out to smother or replace your partner’s idea. We must teach students to address, respect, and build from every single partner utterance. That is, no popcorning —or brick-piling....

Skill 5 - Synthesizing key ideas of the conversation

Ideas, useful and not, float around while talking, and it takes skill and practice to keep track of them and combine the useful ones. Synthesizing conversation ideas means remembering, highlighting, and fitting together key points from the conversation into a coherent thought statement. It is the process of taking the many paraphrased chunks, mentioned in the previous section, fitting them together, weeding some out, and whittling them down into a shared conclusion...

Excerpted from Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking across Disciplines (September 2011) Stenhouse.

The easy part is learning what the skills are; the hard part is teaching them along with all the other things that need to be learned each week. Fortunately, these high-leverage skills are very effective at supporting the learning of most content concepts, skills, and language.