2.  All of these standards depend on student's development of their academic language. Language plays a central role in the common core.  Many of the demanding standards present extra challenges for English learners and linguistically diverse students.

3.  Two dimensions, building on each other's turns to build up an idea, and making sure that these turns focus on the knowledge or skill in the learning objectives.  There are four key skills (create, clarify, negotiate, and fortify ideas) that teachers can and must teach students so that they can have constructive conversations that are in line with the CCSS.  There are also four key ingredients (authentic purpose, clear prompt, original language, sufficient content knowledge) that are often missing from classroom conversations.

4. Teachers get insights if give enough time for students to reflect, hesitate through their thoughts, listen to others, and finally create articulated responses

5. Students take turns, but do not listen to each other, not like in ping pong game Introduce sentence frames for discussions and practice them in pairs to help students build on each other's answers, prompt for evidence, and focus on the learning. Focus on accumulating and choosing short answers, not build on ideas Supply them with appropriate questions to ask to clarify and be able to incorporate new information Fostering students’ respect for one another and nurturing an open, trusting classroom community Students show respect by valuing what others say. When someone listens to your idea, asks you to clarify it, builds on it, and values it, you feel smart

6.  class discussion, even though it might seem awkward, we can help them build their skills at guiding and shaping their discussions.  Another way to model is by teacher being one partner and having the class collectively be the other person.  One more way to model is to have two students, or a teacher and a student, model conversation up front in the middle of the room. This is called a fishbowl.

7.  We can structure turns with tokens by having certain partners begin or end the conversation  use cards that remind students of conversation moves  structure partners to be with certain other partners  have students have second and third conversations, without using notes or supports  scaffold conversations with graphic organizers, charts, and other visuals or written information  provide language in the form of sentence frames

8.  Formative assessment is a set of practices that assists teachers and students to understand where students are, in relation to specific learning goals, while they're in the process of learning.  The goals of the conversation analysis tool, or the CAT, forces us to listen to students' language including their conversational pragmatics. Do they take turns? Do they listen to each other and build on each other's ideas? But the CAT also requires us to access students' thinking through their language, asking us whether they are building up a coherent idea and focusing on the learning objectives of the lesson.  Observing students in conversation allows us to forge into territory that very few previous standards have cared about: students understanding other students. Possibilities and successes in life when we prepare students to understand others who don’t communicate well and to communicate to others who don’t listen well are endless.

9. Analyze evidence of what students can do and need to improve on. Then we reflect and plan what and how we will teach. Then we teach and assess student learning. Then we analyze this evidence and continue to improve, and the cycle continues.