I thought that this week's articles were all very valuable pieces of literature in regards to building up my attitudes and beliefs about how to effectively run a classroom. I liked the specific focus on the utilization of conversation, discussion, and student talk within the classroom and found the content of the articles to be very useful.
I especially like the Goldenberg article, "Instructional Conversations". In this article, Goldenberg stresses the important role that ICs play in molding students into critical thinkers and in stimulating their "conceptual and linguistic development" (Goldenberg 317). Group-based discussions help students to comprehensibly build meaning in regards to a specific topic as well as requiring them to construct their own knowledge and understanding" rather than just receiving knowledge or learning material in a rote manner (324). One specific aspect of the article that I liked was the set of structural elements Goldenberg laid out for formatting an instructional conversation or group discussion. I found the break down of the different elements into two categories (instructional and conversational)and further into five specific elements within each subcategory, not only beneficial to the teacher in regards to actually formatting the discussion, but also to the students in that it helps to focus the discussion so that they are able to build their own understanding in a more effective and encouraging manner (319). I think that the "weaving" metaphor was one which worked perfectly when considering the role of the teacher in guiding an IC and when considering the many elements which contribute to the overall effectiveness of the IC (319).
In addition to the clearly defined structural elements of the IC, I really found the suggestions towards the end of the article for planning an IC to be very beneficial and certainly plan on using these tips when structuring my language arts lesson for my group of first graders. Goldenberg states that ICs are typically "used to guide reading comprehension lessons and activities with small groups" so I see this as a perfect too in creating an effective language arts lesson which focuses around a short piece of literature and an IC centered around some thematic issue within the text(324).
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I agree that these articles were really helpful when thinking about discussions in the classroom. I noticed you did not give any examples from your own classroom experience so I was wondering if that is because you don't see much of it. I know that is the case in my own kindergarten classroom and since you are in a first grade setting, it might be because of their young age.
ReplyDeleteKnowing that we have to plan a lesson for these students based on a classroom discussion has been a little unnerving for me but I agree that the suggestions at the end of the Goldenberg article does in fact help. In the future I hope to see more classroom discussions,especially with the younger grades.