Effective Talk in guided reading

1. Effective Talk in guided reading

2. The Simple View of Reading Looking at the handout Can you place your children on this matrix? What is it that you need to teach and that the children need to learn to be secure in the top right hand quadrant?

3. Guided reading • Introduction • Strategy Check • Independent Reading • Return to the text • Response to the text • Next steps

4. Effective Talk Preparing For the Learning Conversations Nothing to be Afraid of! Consider: What is similar? What is different in terms of the teacher’s talk and the pupils’ learning? What does the teacher do which makes the talk more challenging/effective in version 2?

5. The five types of teaching talk • Rote • Recitation • Exposition • Discussion • Dialogue

6. Recitation • The accumulation of knowledge and understanding through questions designed to test or stimulate recall of what has been previously encountered or to help pupils to work out the answer from clues provided in the question. Robert Alexander (2000) Culture and Pedagogy

7. Principles and Characteristics of dialogic talk • Achieving common understanding through structured and cumulative questioning and discussion. There may, or may not be a right answer but justification and explanation are sought. • Pupils’ thinking is challenged and so understanding is enhanced. The teacher is likely to share several exchanges with a particular child several times in order to move the thinking on. • The pupil’s response is the the fulcrum of the exchange.

8. Recognising dialogic teaching • Collective • Reciprocal • Cumulative • Supportive • Purposeful

9. Recitation Based on known or partially known facts Recalling rather than thinking through Relatively boring to listen to Brief May involve responses from lots of pupils Fails to develop thinking and reasoning. Dialogue Background of fairly deep knowledge or experience Thinking out loud A requirement of justification/ explanation Interesting listeners Sustained with individual pupils Aimed at improving thinking and reasoning. Moving from recitation to dialogue

10. Preparing for learning conversations • The repertoire of teaching talk and its application • Clear learning objectives • The importance of ‘rich’ texts • Questions/contexts that give rise to thoughtful responses

11. Basic questions/context types • Literal • Inferential • Deductive • Evaluative • Justification

12. Transcript of ‘At the Zoo’ conversation Teacher: Jack, please tell us which story you preferred, and why. Jack: I preferred ‘At the Zoo’ because it was very mysterious and you didn’t find out what was looking at what until the very end because when I first heard the story I thought there were some new arriving animals and the children were looking at them for a school project but at the end I found that these aliens were actually looking at humans at the zoo and the humans were the new arrivals.

13. Teacher: The story sounds very confusing. When did you understand that the children were in cages? • Jack: Oh, not until the very end. In fact, the first time I read it I didn’t get it at all. It took two readings and then I thought, “Now I know what’s going on!”

14. Teacher: But on out list of ‘what makes a book worth reading’ that we wrote earlier, we put “Easy to read”. ‘At the Zoo’ doesn’t sound like it was an easy story if you had to read it twice to understand it. • Jack: Yes, but the words were easy. The story wasn’t. The story was a mystery, and I like mysteries, so that is why I like ‘At the Zoo’ better.

15. Teacher: So Jack prefers ‘At the Zoo’. What about you Karen?

16. Dialogue • The pupil’s response is the fulcrum of the exchange • The conversations have cognitive challenge