Stanford Webinar - Rich Talk=Rich Learning: How to Establish a Culture of Constructive Conversation

Join Kenji Hakuta, Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, and his colleagues Drs. Jeff Zwiers and Sara Rutherford-Quach, as they explore the importance of language, and specifically conversation, in content-area learning.

You will learn:

•The importance of building student discourse across disciplines

•The value of using conversations to regularly evaluate your lessons and improve your teaching

Presented by the new, online course Effective Conversation in the Classroom (http://scpd.stanford.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=66515878)

This webinar had a very active Q&A during the live session. Since not all questions were answered in the video, responses are provided here:

1. Have you ever asked students to use apps on their smart phones to record their conversations and send them to you as teacher?

Some of our participants who are high school teaches have asked their students to record themselves on their phones and submit the recordings afterwards; however, we do not require every participating teachers to do so.

2. Do you share your FAC Dimensions rubric with your students?

Yes, some teachers used the rubric as learning objectives and shared with their students.

3. Do you have video or acted out examples to share these ideas with other teachers or with students?

If you sign up for the course, Effective Conversation in the Classroom, offered through scpd.stanford.edu, feel free to show the videos with other teachers or students. Some of our teachers found that sharing classroom videos with their students actually inspired them to talk like those students in the videos!

4. Most examples given are from younger students. Do you have any examples with middle or high school students?

There will be examples across grade levels in the course, Effective Conversation in the Classroom, offered through scpd.stanford.edu.

5. Hi Sara, I really liked your idea about recording conversations. How did you go about this in your classroom? What device did you use?

Most of our teachers used their smartphones or iPads to record the conversations of their students. Sara said she actually prefers digital recorder, which might be a little bit old-school, but some digital recorders have better mic to receive sounds.

6. Has a student self-assessment tool been created?

Some teachers in our past MOOCs adapted the language tools and made them into student-facing materials for students to formatively assess themselves! We are happy to share those tools in our course.

7. Are "these tools" available to the public?

Currently, these tools are only available to participants in the course, Effective Conversation in the Classroom, offered through scpd.stanford.edu.

8. Kenji indicated these are organic and not scripted, but are there times that sentence starters can help ELLs start the prompt? (some students at earlier proficiency levels sit quietly and will begin if they have a short phrase to help start)

In some of the classroom videos in the course, you will see some teachers use sentence frames/starters to scaffold their students’ learning.

9. Will the 3 week course be suitable for math classes and middle school students?

Yes, the course is suitable for teachers teaching all subject areas across grades K-12.

10. Did you say the conversations should be transcribed?

You won’t be recording and transcribing student conversations in this course because we know that not every one of you has access to a classroom in the summer. We will provide transcripts for participants to practice with the conversation analysis tool in the course.

11. Can I use the slide showing the collaborative mindsets among students in my classroom?

Yes. Feel free to use the slides presented during the webinar.

12. I understand that the conversation analysis tool is a formative assessment tool. Is there a tool for summative assessment of the listening and speaking standards?

No.