Empowering Classroom Conversations: Building Confidence and Community (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: These are the keys to participating in a conversation fully. Sometimes we all need a little bit of a kickstarter to feel like we can contribute. Children are going to struggle a bit, depending on how confident they feel in speaking up in class. And yet this teacher wants everybody in the class to feel valued. So the kids are all learning phrases that can inspire other kids to contribute more easily.

Speaker 2: We're trying to build a conversation here that is a community of caring and respect. So look at your talk moves on the table today, and I have a post-it note here for you. Talk moves are essentially sentence starters that students can use to get themselves into the conversation and to draw other people into the conversation. I taped the talk moves right on the table so that they would be ever-present in everyone's mind. Today, I want you to keep track of your talk moves. Every time they used a talk move, they put a check on their sticky note. So if somebody at your table looks like they don't have a talk move checkmark yet, invite them into the conversation. How could you do that? Say like, what do you think? Definitely. Would you use their name? Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 1: Everything about activating a child's cognitive skills begins with activating their social connectedness. Verbalizing and using language and working with peers creates that kind of social stimulus that drives the development of the brain.

Speaker 3: I pretty much look at the thing every single time to see if there's something I can say, like a clarifying question. Can you explain more about, like, why you would get in trouble? He spray painted something on his rival soccer team's school, and he, like... When you ask a person a clarifying question, it's either, oh, I heard you said, or can you repeat what you said, or to add on to.

Speaker 2: They help enormously with language learners. They give everybody a platform to jump into a conversation because half the sentence is there for them already. But they also challenge other types of learners who may be accustomed to doing independent work, and they need a bridge to collaborate more with a group. It pushes kids out of their comfort zone of social conversations, and it moves them more towards a professional and an academic kind of register.

Speaker 4: All his accomplishments in his past, like all the other marches he had, like Martin Luther King, his other previous marches, and he wants to help his next march. I heard you say previous marches. Like, does it say anything about, like... Yeah, like he was in Martin Luther King marches.

Speaker 2: I do talk moves because in order to have a great discussion, everyone has to feel like they're part of it and valued. And when they walk away, they really have bridged a gap with someone that maybe they wouldn't have necessarily talked to or talked to on that level.

Speaker 1: This teacher is aware of children having different levels of comfort and discomfort, of making their skills visible, and she's getting kids to support each other's participation with these talk moves. This teacher created a pathway for every single child in this class to belong.