For response-centered talk to take place successfully, there is scaffolding that the teacher must do with the students. If needed, a teacher must help students become involved in the conversation. A teacher can also scaffold by interrupting a talk with an interpretive question to keep them on track.
In my field placement, there are many students who would need scaffolding in order to learn how to carry on an effective discussion. Many of the students express ideas with the class and they are not clear either due to a language barrier or disjointed ideas. When this does happen, it would be appropriate for the teacher to step-in and restate what the student is trying to say. Also, it would be important to scaffold by prompting students with interpretive questions and also by prompting students to respond either with their opinions, ideas or questions. Scaffolding would be an important component here in my classroom because the students have never experienced anything like response-centered talk before in the room.
3 comments:
I too witness only recitation talks in my field placement. After reading the assigned articles from last week, I am really interested to see first hand how to incorporate a discussion in a first grade classroom. However, while writing my reflection to the article I did not think too much about scaffolding. Reading your blog, I too feel that the whole class would benefit from scaffolding when first introducing response-centered talks because none of the students have the experience needed to successfully partake in an actual discussion.
I also agree. In my first grade class i see some student centered talks but there is a lot of worksheets and teacher-directed learning. I agree with Olivia and i believe that it is important to know how to incorporate this scaffolding in the classroom as well as response-centered talks.
As opposed to your class, I tend to see a lot of response-centered talk and less recitation. But similar to you I talked about the need for scaffolding to get all students involved in the conversation. I wondered if you had any ideas of ways to get students who aren't responding to your prompts to enter the conversation? Do you think it is would be beneficial to single that child out, and ask them a question? This was one of the things I thought about when I talked about scaffolding discussion.
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