Want to Have Better Discussions in Your K-5 Classroom? Bust a Talk Move!
Strategies to get our youngest learners thinking — and talking about texts!
We’ve all had those moments in a classroom when you, as the teacher, have planned a great discussion about a particular topic or text. You’ve set aside a good chunk of time in your timetable for it, but it falls flat on its face.
You hear the distinct sounds of crickets in the room, and it becomes like pulling teeth to get more than a one-word response out of students, let alone getting students to build on one another’s ideas.
What the Research Says About Building Better K-5 Discussions
The ability to think, articulate, and discuss ideas and disciplinary content is critical to students’ success, and it is just as relevant in a K-5 literacy classroom as in an undergraduate course.
Developing the academic language and discourse required to make connections, develop opinions, and build a shared understanding of ideas can be transferred to all areas of learning. In a literacy classroom, if we want students to be able to respond to texts in writing in an articulate manner that develops and discusses ideas, then they first need to develop and discuss these ideas with others.
The belief around the power of discourse and discussion in a classroom is not new. Literacy experts have been arguing for purposeful talk in classrooms for decades.
- Vygotsky (1978) contends that, by giving students practice talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own.
- Wolf, Crosson, & Resnick (2004) agree that good accountable talk moves have a positive and strong relationship with the level of rigor in lessons.
- Maria Nichols, in her 2019 book Building Bigger Ideas: A Process for Teaching Purposeful Talk, states that purposeful talk around text helps to construct ideas that are bigger, bolder, and more inclusive than students could possibly construct individually.
- Nichols adds that the kind of talk successful collaborators in the ‘real world’ engage in is purposeful, and “that purpose is to tackle the unknown — to strategize, to innovate, to problem-solve, to construct understanding.”
These are precisely the kind of skills we want our students to engage in.
Why isn’t discourse and discussion the norm in all K-5 literacy classrooms? For starters, building discourse around text in a K-5 literacy classroom through a focus on purposeful or accountable talk is vastly different from more traditional question-and-answer or listen-and-retell exchanges.
Talk Moves to Engage K-5 Students in Collaborative Discussions
The teacher plays a crucial role in facilitating student discussions in their classrooms. As a teacher who is creating space and structure for these collaborative conversations, it’s their job to help kids shine and grow their thinking together. It is their job to offer the right amount of support when needed by modeling and scaffolding responses and by modeling “talk moves” that are necessary for participating in the group, moves such as adding on to a comment or disagreeing.
Most importantly, it is their job to model how to think deeply about the text using examples and textual evidence. Eventually, their job is to step back and allow their students space to try these moves out for themselves and to let them shine as they become responsible for conversing collaboratively.
The chart below lists the “talk moves” that you can use in the classroom.
This article was adapted from Sonya Fleming’s 2022 collaborative session, “Building Discourse in a K-5 Classroom,” at Literacy For All: The National Institute, Carnegie Learning’s annual professional learning event for literacy educators.
For more information, check out our full blog on the topic:
