Like a well-tuned engine, lively classroom discussion thrums with a compelling energy—racing, idling at times, accelerating again in new directions. But it’s often a frustrating experience when a discussion doesn’t go as hoped, especially considering it may even be the same group of students caught up in the work one day and withdrawing the next. We find ourselves lobbing questions to a disengaged audience, and suddenly, yesterday’s well-tuned engine is rattling and coughing with a misfire.

While everyone will face challenges facilitating discussion-based instruction at times, we must remember that all of our classes can engage in productive dialogue. The question isn’t whether our students are inherently bad or good at discussion but is always, “What is the next step we can take?”

Moving Along the Continuum

Collaborative, engaged discourse in the ELA classroom is essential - a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. Explicitly required in most states’ standards, dialogue is at the heart of how we learn and interact with new skills and information (Vygotsky, 1978) – especially as we navigate complex texts (e.g., Kamil et al., 2008).

“We now have robust and replicable evidence that talk that is well-structured and cognitively demanding has a direct and positive impact on student engagement and learning.”

– Robin Alexander

When considering how to help students grow in these practices, I often refer to the following progression of goals (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015):

Regardless of where we place ourselves or our students along this continuum, we can simplify the next steps by considering two avenues of action:

• We can teach students productive talk routines to alter the structure of student dialogue, and
• We can practice shifting our own talk moves to elevate the content of student responses.

Teach productive talk routines

Teaching specific norms and talk routines helps scaffold student participation in productive ways. While the eventual goal is to enable natural, free-flowing academic conversation, you may recognize the need for focused practice or instruction related to the goals named above.

Before digging more deeply into helping students share their thoughts and listen carefully to one another (goals 1 and 2), it’s vital to lock in a community understanding of shared ground rules. Students need to know the basic expectations of classroom discourse and feel confident that all present will treat their ideas respectfully. IBD has often used the following chart for these purposes:

Such expectations can be made more sophisticated when working with older students and challenging topics; other models are easy to find. Ground rules are only the beginning, though; to be effective, students need to see the teacher taking these expectations seriously.

When you need a routine to get reluctant students talking, consider a practice like “Save the Last Word for Me.” After reading a text, students work in groups of four, following a protocol to share and respond to different quotes or passages they’ve selected. The protocol's simplicity makes it accessible to almost any student, and it draws students’ ideas out into the environment where they can be discussed later. Every student will share and speak during this process, but they’ll get to try out their thinking in low-pressure small groups before any larger discussion, and because the focus is primarily on the quoted passage, it can lessen the feeling of being “in the spotlight” while sharing.

“Save the Last Word” is great for goals 1 and 2, but when you’re looking for a routine to push students to deepen their reasoning and engage directly with one another’s ideas - goals 3 and 4 - another option is “Stronger and Clearer Each Time.” 

First, students write individual responses to a prompt – for example, an interpretive question about a class text – in which they communicate their ideas, evidence, and reasoning. In a series of structured partner conversations that follow, each student shares their thinking (ideally, without reading it verbatim) while their partner asks follow-up questions, seeking clarification and specific examples. After each conversation, students add notes based on their interactions, and after two or three rounds each student redrafts their response. This draft should be stronger and clearer—the ideas better defined and more explicit, the evidence more comprehensive, and the vocabulary sharpened and more academic in nature.

As with “Save the Last Word,” this protocol pulls every student into conversation with clear expectations and defined roles, yet it relies entirely on student thinking and input.

Grow your own repertoire of talk moves

Whenever possible, we want to avoid what are often called “I-R-E” interactions, in which a teacher initiates a question with a known answer, a student responds to that question, and the teacher evaluates their response as on- or off-target. Instead of opening up into thoughtful conversation, IRE interactions tend to center the teacher’s judgments and shut down student dialogue. An example of IRE might look like this:

Teacher: “Why did the narrator keep saying he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten expelled?”

Student: “Maybe because he was afraid of what his parents would think.”

Teacher: “Yeah, good! Probably so.”

The next time a student shares an idea or response, instead of giving them a perfunctory “Good!”, push the student to do one of the following moves identified by Zwiers and Crawford:

1. Elaborate and clarify their thinking
2. Support their ideas with examples
3. Build on and/or challenge a partner’s idea
4. Paraphrase their own argument - or the discussion so far
5. Synthesize conversation points

These moves aren’t complicated – typically, it just requires changing your automatic responses from ones that end an interaction to ones like these:

• Can you tell me more about that?
• What makes you think that?
• Do you agree or disagree with what ______ just said?
• Who can add to this idea? Does anyone want to push back on it or offer an alternative?

Making a habit of these responses improves each interaction and helps elevate the expectations in the classroom as a whole. Over time, students understand that they will be expected to support and extend their thinking and start making a habit of it on their own.

No Time Like the Present

Whether you’re picking yourself up after a rough Tuesday and wondering if your students can say just four civil words to one another, or you’re basking in the afterglow of a discussion so insightful it gave you goosebumps, the work is the same: think about the continuum and ask yourself, What’s the next step we can take?

Reflect on your students’ needs, then take two actions:

1. Choose one new structured talk routine to introduce to students and
2. Make a deliberate effort to regularly incorporate at least one talk move into your responses to students.

With time, you and your students can break out of the slow, sparkless putter of the old IRE interactions. If our goals are for students to “listen to what others say, share ideas, give and receive help, clarify misunderstandings…resolve problems, and…construct new understandings or ways of thinking,” as Robyn Gillies (2019) writes, then we need to recognize that classroom dialogue is the gas in the tank—and it’s time to fill it up.

“When students have opportunities to interact with others, they learn to listen to what others say, share ideas, give and receive help, clarify misunderstandings, and resolve problems, and, in so doing, construct new understandings or ways of thinking.”

– Robyn M. Gillies

Citations:

• Alexander, R. (2020). A Dialogic Teaching Companion (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351040143

• Gillies, R. M. (2019). Promoting academically productive student dialogue during collaborative learning. International Journal of Educational Research, 97, 200–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.07.014

• Kamil, M. L., Borman, G. D., Dole, J., Kral, C. C., Salinger, T., & Torgesen, J. (2008). Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices. IES Practice Guide. NCEE 2008-4027. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

• Michaels, S., & O’Connor, C. (2015). Conceptualizing talk moves as tools: Professional development approaches for academically productive discussion. In Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue (pp. 347–362). AERA.

• Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

• Zwiers, J., & Crawford, M. (2011). Academic conversations: Classroom talk that fosters critical thinking and content understandings. Stenhouse Publishers.