Productive Talk

Reading experts have long known that reading is a social process and that talking about text is an important tool for comprehending, learning from, synthesizing across, and generating new ideas. This kind of talk allows students to transform and deepen their thinking by reasoning together. When students in The Hive lead their own discussions about text and use talk to reason and respond together, they grow as readers and thinkers. This kind of talk goes beyond a teacher's interpretations of text and can reveal surprising new perspectives and ways of thinking. 

This week, we began our project-based learning exploration into the early civilizations of North America. Students were given opportunities to explore a variety of texts and ideas together by listening, questioning, sharing, discussing, building on and constructively challenging one another’s contributions, while sometimes working toward a consensus interpretation and other times recognizing the need to respectfully honor differing viewpoints. These collaborative discussions pushed students to reason together, rather than simply holding on to their initial beliefs or impressions. Some students even reconsidered or questioned their beliefs through these powerful discussions, and they were the most magical moments of discovery to observe. This week's guest bloggers reflect on the power of productive talk. Enjoy.

Doing the community sketchnote activity helped me deepen my understanding of Inuit culture because other people in my group were good about explaining things differently than the way I saw them. We all had different ideas which made my understanding of everything more meaningful.    - @Magician-of-IceCream

My participation in the community sketchnote collaboration helped deepen my understanding of Inuit culture. By having the whole group put together everything they knew about the Inuit people and put it into a big sketchnote, ours was chockful of information. Also, when we did a gallery walk of other groups' sketchnotes, it was basically an information exchange since every sketchnote was different. I was able to learn even more by seeing how differently other people thought.  - @JerrysApples

I now have a deeper understanding of Inuit culture because we shared our learning with each other. Discussing and sketchnoting what we learned as a group was helpful because if we only stick with our own way of thinking, we won't learn anything new or we might be wrong about something and never know it. We can learn more by listening to other people's ideas and thoughts.   - @ArcticFox

My group's discussion about Inuit culture helped to deepen my understanding and it gave me more details about things I already knew. For example, I did know a little bit about the tools they used for hunting, but now I know that when they caught a whale, they would use the bones to make tools, eat the meat, and use the skin for clothing or to cover their shelter.    - @HarryPotter

My participation in the community sketchnote collaboration helped deepen my understanding of Inuit culture because you get to see other people's ideas and you get to practice working with other people. It's also helpful because other people have ideas that you maybe didn't think of.    - @ThatOneGuy...

My participation in the community sketchnote collaboration helped deepen my understanding of Inuit culture because I was hearing what others learned from the text, and it helped me expand my mind about what I had learned. Also, some people in my group may have understood things differently and when we talked about it, it helped all of us understand it better.    - @LightningDragon

My participation in our book club experiences has prepared me to have more meaningful conversations about texts because we know how to ask THICK questions and keep a discussion going.    - @WritingGod

My participation in the book club experience helped me have more meaningful conversations about texts in two ways. One way books clubs help is that in book clubs, somebody usually starts by asking a "thick question". It starts a chain reaction of thoughts and feelings about a topic. This happened a lot in my sketchnote group, so I think it's from our book club experiences. Another reason I think book clubs helped with our text discussion is that we learned about "piggybacking" and we used that during our Inuit text discussion which really helped make our discussion even better.    - @TheScienceGeek

My participation in our book club experiences prepared me to have more meaningful conversations about texts. It helps me listen to what others have to say and to know how to add to someone's idea.     -@RV17

My participation in the community sketchnote collaboration helped deepen my understanding of Inuit culture because I was letting in other people's ideas and illustrations that I had not thought of. Being able to visualize the culture definitely helped me with my understanding.    - @ZombieCat126

My participation in the community sketchnote collaboration helped deepen my understanding of Inuit culture because when we were drawing and talking about our ideas for our sketchnote, I didn't always know what something was or what something meant, but when we talked about it and did our gallery walk, all of the other sketchnotes shaped how I thought about the Inuit people.  - @Burt

Sources: McElhone , doi e-ssentials What’s New in Literacy Teaching? International Reading Association, Jan. 2014, https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/member-benefits/e-ssentials/ila-e-ssentials