Instructional Conversations

In Goldenberg's article, I found that the topic of instructional conversations are not exactly what I thought. The original idea I had about discussions (not necessarily ICs) in a classroom were that they were essential in student comprehension but the amount of preparation that teachers put into them, I was surprised. Not that I object to it, but I feel somewhat bad for my English teacher that tried to get us to discuss a reading that had been assigned. She was always enthusiastic but our class was not always compliant. Now, knowing the thought and effort it takes behind trying to effectively discuss a topic, I now know why she would become frustrated at the grand idea she probably had but never saw played out. Hopefully, that won't happen when I do my guided reading activity with students...

On page 322, there was a sentence that specifically grabbed my attention: "We have found that when students participate in discussions such as this, their writing about a complex concept such as friendship demonstrates greater sophistication and depth of understanding without sacrificing literal comprehension of the story they have read." From my placement, I was able to see this sentence come to life last week. The CT had read a story on Ruby Bridges, as a part of Black History Month, and the students were broken into groups to do a "book discussion," facilitated by the CT, myself, and two MSU juniors. As part of the discussion, they were answering questions prompted by a given worksheet (I had no preparation for this, otherwise I would probably have been an inadequate discussion leader at this point) but the questions were not simple ones with distinct answers. One question asked students to think about Ruby and after finding out that she grew up to be a successful businesswoman, to write a paragraph to tell why they thought she was successful. The CT assisted by brainstorming with the class words to describe Ruby, But throughout the discussion our group had about how Ruby had been treated and her reactions to it all, the students surprised me by their insights on how she became successful. They had used ideas of their own, along with ideas other students contributed to create paragraphs that, I thought, exceeded the 2nd grade level. So this experience was evidence to me that ICs should be used more frequently to push students further to make them better thinkers and writers.