Speaker 1: Do you want your students to get better at classroom discussions? How do you get them to not only say more, but also improve the overall quality of what they talk about in their discussions? That's coming up in today's video. Hi everyone, I'm Leigh Hall from Literacy Teachers and I'm all about giving you the tools you need to inspire, motivate, and change how your students read and write for academic success. If you're new here, make sure you hit the subscribe button so that you get new notifications as I put out new videos each week. So today we're going to be talking about how to establish ground rules for classroom discussions to increase participation. One of the things that I have found is that while students might be very interested in participating in classroom discussions, if you want to get both a quantity and a quality in terms of their participation, you're going to have to set a framework. You're going to have to set some basic ground rules in place to help them understand what is expected of them and what is expected of their peers. And in doing this, as I talk about this right now, the thing to remember is that these are not rules that you create to impose on them. These rules are co-created, which means you and your students are going to have to talk about what matters when you have discussions. That means what matters for them and also what matters for you as their teacher. So as we are thinking about coming up with a list of ground rules, I think about one of the questions that I get is, well, how many ground rules should I have? And my answer to that would be three to five, okay? No more than five. If you have more than five, you start getting this very long list and normally it's getting into the minutiae and students can't keep track of more than five things, okay? So they're not going to be able to follow all the rules on the list. So you're going to have to decide what are the three to five most important things that you want to use to frame classroom discussions, all right, that should help increase participation. These do not have to be set in stone. You can always go back as a class and revisit them, change them, delete them, whatever, add different ones in their place, okay? So keep that in mind. Now, when you're talking to your students about what ground rules should we have for classroom discussion, there are some things that I think you should have them think about. Have them think about examples of discussions in their past that went really well, okay? And have them identify some concrete examples of what you think made those classroom discussions go so well, okay? And you can use those as things to think about that you want to include in your rules so that your classroom discussions work well. But you also want to think about examples, have them think about examples in their past of classroom discussions that did not go well for any reason, be it because of them or because of other people, it doesn't matter, but what behaviors in those discussions made them not work well? Because we want to think about what works well, what doesn't work well, and then bring all that together to identify our three to five main rules that are going to really support classroom discussions and increase student participation. Now, for me as a teacher, I like to always make sure we cover two things if they don't come up automatically. And the first one is, how much should we participate? Now, I am not a person that thinks we need to say every student must participate three times or five times during a classroom discussion. Some discussions are longer, and some discussions are shorter. And in some discussions, you will, as a participant, naturally have more or less to say based on any number of things. I understand that, and the students understand that, too. But how should we generally think about participation, okay? Because I don't think we want a rule that says everyone participates all the time, but what does a quality participant look like? Okay, what do we expect from ourselves? What do we expect from each other? I like to have them talk about that, okay? The other thing, the second thing I like them to talk about is, how do we determine who gets the floor, okay? And we can think about that in a small group context and in a whole class context. So for example, in a whole class context, do we raise our hands, you know, and let the teacher pick who speaks, okay? Because that would be one way to do it. But some classes, honestly, they don't like that. Some classes like to have the person who spoke last pick the next person, okay, who gets to talk. Kids will come up with a variety of ideas. You can try them out. And if they don't work, then you come back and say, we tried this, here's the problem. We either have to fix the problem, or we need a new rule, a new way of thinking about how we determine who gets to talk. Those are two things that are important for me as a teacher to make sure that we cover, all right? So, thanks for watching. And don't forget to subscribe so you can catch all of my videos. And while you're at it, share with me your experiences of creating ground rules in the comments so that we can hear other ideas, share some of the rules that you and your students use. And please let me know if you have any questions about this video, any questions at all about creating classroom discussions, so that I can help you move forward with your journey.