Literacy Resources for Teachers: Speaking, Listening & Vocabulary Resources

To give more students a chance to talk, and to provide a built-in source of peer feedback on discussion skills/behaviors, the Inner Circle-Outer Circle strategy frames half the class as discussion participants and the other half as focused listeners.

Consensus decision making is predicated on sociocultural learning theory, specifically the notion that knowledge is fundamentally socially constructed. Echoing Vygotsky, Smith and Wilhelm (2006) note “we share our consciousness through conversation and achieve intersubjectivity—the ability to learn by combining our consciousness with another’s.

Students first read and discuss issue statements related to the text. They respond to the list of issue statements individually, providing rationale for their positions. Students then discuss their positions in small groups and as a whole class, focusing on the areas that prompted the biggest disagreements among students.

This Strategy Guide describes the processes involved in composing and producing audio files that are published online as podcasts.

Socratic seminars are named for their embodiment of Socrates’ belief in the power of asking questions, prize inquiry over information and discussion over debate. This strategy guide explains Socratic seminars and offers practical methods for applying the approach in your classroom to help students investigate multiple perspectives in a text.

This article from the New York Times provides background information on distinguishing between Tier 1, 2, and 3 level vocabulary.

Includes ideas and suggestions specifically for teaching content-specific vocabulary. Although the audience is ELL teachers, the strategies provided can be used with students of all abilities.

In this guide, you will learn how to use the Concept Circles strategy to support vocabulary development and comprehension of complex text.

Dialogue and conversation are cornerstones to our approaches in helping students try out and develop new ideas, but not all learners are equally comfortable or adept at participating in large- or even small-group verbal discussions. Silent conversations capitalize on the social nature of learning by asking students to share their thinking and to build from and reflect on the thinking of others, but they do so by allowing students the to use writing for additional time to think and refine their ideas.