Supporting Comprehension through Text-Based Discussion EDC423

Goals for Understanding ► The important parts of planning for a text-based discussion  Text analysis  Setting learning goals ► The kinds of questions and responses to students that support students in building a robust mental representation of a text ► How to apply a scheme for planning, conducting, and evaluating text-based discussions ► How to assess whether students actually learned what you set out in your learning goals

The Architecture of a Text-Based Discussion

 Select the text  Analyze the text  Identify learning goals  Segment the text  Plan out initial questions The Plan

The Discussion ► Launch  Question/activity/comment  Use of time  Use of voice/gesture/text ► Support student interactions with the text  Use of plan  Question asking  Responding to students ► Exit  Assessment  Transitioning

Quality Questions… ► Lead students to make connections  So what’s this about pheromones, food, and a chemical trail? ► Focus student thinking on specific information in a text  So now we start to find out more about the dance. What do we find out?  The author told us a lot about pheromones here. What did we find out about them?  “The males can’t help themselves.” What does that mean?  There’s a lot of information in that long section, but what do you think the most important ideas are? What do you think the author wants us to understand from this part?

Quality Questions… ► Elicit explanation  How would that work? ► Support students in making inferences  Why do you think Lee is acting this way? What is she trying to do? ► Get at the big ideas  Why did scientists invent a robot bee?

Quality Responses to Student Comments… ► Connect student ideas, weave them together  You have given us such good examples of how the ants release the pheromone. Putting them together lets us understand how that works very well now. ► Revoice student ideas, or pick the important ideas and suggest what students were trying to say  It seems as if you’re talking about the robot as if it were a little bee. Is that what you mean? ► Bring students back into the text to reread and talk about what that part of the text is about

Quality Responses to Student Comments… ► Bring students back into the text to reread and talk about what that part of the text is about ► Acknowledge and use important student comments and ideas  That’s a very important idea. Let’s remember that. ► Encourage students to explain, elaborate, and provide reasons for their thinking  Tell us more about that. What makes you think that way? ► Provide additional information that is not in the text, but could help students in comprehending the text  There’s no information in the text that explains how this works, so I had to look up some facts about how the dance is really done.

Unproductive Moves ► Asking students about personal experiences related to the text ► Asking students to predict ► Repeating verbatim student contributions ► Collecting a series of student responses to one question without building connections ► Over-relying on questions that ask students to retrieve or remember information in the text ► Asking students to guess at the meaning of a word, instead of providing a quick definition