Making Use Of Discussion To Enhance Students' Literacy Achievement
You've accomplished the impressive feat of getting your students to talk and listen to one another, reviewing the characteristics of high literacy, and using the Envisionment-Building framework to help you orchestrate discussions. Now we'll look at how to use Langer's four stances to create your Envisionment Building guide or EB guide, as we've come to refer to it. In a nutshell, it's the most astute "cheat sheet" available.
Many teachers began by asking generic questions for each of the four stances—questions that could be used with almost any text. They printed them on a giant slip of paper known as the bookmark. You will, however, get a better tool if you create your authentic questions based on a text you are about to discuss with your students. Developing envisionment-building questions becomes a natural part of the planning process over time; your questions may not even need to be written down before class discussion. As a starting point, use the general questions on the bookmark. After demonstrating the procedure, the students can create their envisioning questions (CCA Dewi, 2021).
How to Create an Envisioning Question Guide
The four sections of Envision-building guides correspond to the stances that effective readers take while reading texts: initial understanding (stepping in), developing ideas (moving through), learning from the text (stepping out), and taking a critical stance (stepping out and thinking critically). The process of preparing for discussion helps to bring a text to life, and it also piques your interest in how students might react. A straightforward way to understand what a teacher does during a discussion is to observe student-teacher interactions and pay attention to who is speaking and what they say. Looking closely at this is one way to understand what a teacher does during a discussion.
Using Questioning for Writing Purposes
Throughout the discussion, students' comments are carefully considered and frequently serve as the foundation for the next question or remark. This can be used as a guide to develop writing assignments before or after a discussion and provide stance-related questions during a discussion. Other teachers have discovered that writing effectively extends the discussion, with prompts sometimes found in new envisionment-building questions. Preparing for and leading a discussion are two of the essential strategies for developing students' thinking over time and increasing their ability to develop a deeper understanding of the texts they read. At this point, students are actively engaged in developing sophisticated literacy skills that will help them succeed in college and high school reading and writing tasks.
Create Ongoing Opportunities For Reflection And Exploration To Promote Long-Term Understanding And Growth
Misreadings and incorrect answers are viewed as part of the process of understanding a text world during envisionment building. Allow students plenty of opportunities to discuss their ideas. Another simple way for students to see progress in their understanding is to have them read the text twice, once with a pencil and once with a pen.
Conclusion
Building literacy through discussion begins with planning, preparing for, and orchestrating practical classroom discussions. A powerful, motivating component augments these critical literacy tasks: This type of learning is enjoyable for students. Listening to students experiment with ideas, develop empathy, and laugh together shows that you've mastered dialogic discussion (I Keppo, 2021).
How do you increase student engagement through discussion? Well, I have a couple of ways to engage students during a discussion. Have you heard of these activities?
References
CCA Dewi, M. E. (2021). The effect of contextual collaborative learning based ethnoscience to increase student's scientific literacy ability.
I Keppo, I. B. (2021). Exploring the possibility space: taking stock of the diverse capabilities and gaps in integrated assessment models.