Part of quality speaking instruction — particularly speech delivery instruction — is helping students eliminate their distracting speech behaviors. If you’re familiar with Erik Palmer’s PVLEGS acronym for speech delivery (a must-use, in my opinion), such behaviors are Poise issues. Here are some of the distracting habits my kids bring into their pop-up debates and small group discussions each year: Fillers (“like,” […]
A Simple Classroom Birthday Tradition
My birthday was last week, [1] which means that I had a chance to participate in our classroom birthday tradition: words of wisdom. I’ll share my words (actually, they’re not mine) next week, but for this week let’s just talk about what “words of wisdom” is, why I think it’s a worthwhile investment of roughly one […]
Conversation Challenge: an Efficient, Simple Small-Group Discussion Strategy
When I want every student to speak in a capacity more involved than Think-Pair-Share yet more efficient than pop-up debate, I tend to use something I call Conversation Challenge. Conversation Challenge is simply a way of framing small group discussions. Instead of only saying, “Discuss [insert prompt here] about [insert text here],” I add one additional […]
Keep These Things in Mind When Thinking about Student Discussions
Ashley Pacholewski sent me an email this week. Ashley is a teacher at Brunswick High School in Ohio, and she had a great question: “What discussion strategies do you use at the end of the week when using Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week assignment?” Since I was already in “filming lessons mode” for the Teaching with […]
Education, Not Entertainment
We are currently teaching the most entertained generation in the history of humankind. I don’t say that disparagingly; my generation is not morally superior to the students I teach simply because we had access to exponentially less entertainment. (And we certainly had access to more than our parents.) But consider: YouTube is incredible. The blogosphere […]