Meaningful Discourse is more than just students talking to each other. The elements of discourse include planning, implementing, and classroom culture. Planning includes things such as establishing expectations and norms, setting and agenda with established questions, creating sentence stems and other conversational scaffolds, and designing post-discussion assessments. The planning stage will also include selecting the appropriate strategy for implementation, anticipating student responses, identifying misconceptions that may arise, and possibly selecting and sequencing student work. Questioning is another important skill for the teacher, such as asking probing questions to further student thinking and using convergent and divergent questions. An effective way to plan questions is to develop a monitoring plan.
Selecting the appropriate strategy and thorough planning are critical elements of meaningful discourse, but the third important element is classroom culture. Having a classroom culture where students feel safe and empowered to share their ideas is a crucial component to meaningful discourse. This is not something that you can plan or build over night, but it incorporates social & emotional learning (SEL), culturally responsive teaching, and getting to know your students.
Universal Design for Learning can help enhance Discourse and ensure that all students are offered equal learning opportunities. There are many ways to use the UDL checkpoints to inform the planning and facilitation of Discourse. Below we have highlighted a few checkpoints that are directly related to Discourse and have linked to the associated strategy guide.
Throughout your experiences as a teacher, both in your graduate classes and professionally, you will be evaluated on many aspects of your teaching. In your Clinical Practice at Relay, and possibly in your professional experiences, you will be evaluated using the Danielson Rubric, sometimes referred to as the Framework for Teaching. There are a many Domain Components that connect to discourse. Below are a few Domain Components that connect to the elements of Discourse:
In each of the above links you can review the associated rubrics for each Domain Component. Note that you may encounter different column names at different schools but the description of each generally stays the same It is important to know that the "Basic" column is considered the baseline for all teachers (new and experienced), the "Proficient" column is a good reach, and while "Distinguished" is the ultimate goal it should not be considered the only good score. In other words, all teachers should aim for Basic and in time should strive towards Proficient and possibly Distinguished.
Each Domain Component has its own rubric that helps interpret the expectations and requirements. In each rubric there is a top row that explains the requirements for that specific component. Below that are a series of rows grouped as Critical Attributes. These are designed to give more explanation of how to interpret the component within a column. Start with the Basic column and use the Critical Attributes to get a sense of what the Domain Component looks like in application.
For example, 3b directly relates to the actual classroom implementation of Discourse. Starting with the Basic column we can see that "Questioning and discussions, primarily framed and led by the teacher, are used to support student learning and development", but what does this mean exactly?
This is where the critical attributes help interpret the rubric statement. Using the three critical attributes we can see that "the teacher frames questions to promote critical thinking and deeper understanding", "questioning and discussion invite students to explain their thinking and reflect on their learning", and "the teacher calls on many students or invites them to directly respond to one another". This starts to give a sense of what the classroom experience would like look. Additionally, each description includes details that differentiate between the columns, so while "the teacher frames questions to promote critical thinking and deeper understanding", there is "uneven success".
So while you are planning for Discourse you can refer to the critical attributes for each Domain Component to inform the planning and facilitation.