Discourse Resources

Discourse involves students engaging in meaningful focused interactions where students (and not teachers) are sharing, evaluating, and interpreting the ideas and arguments of others. Discourse can clarify student thinking, address misconceptions, highlight student work completion, showcase multiple approaches, and build high level connections across content and standards.

In order to create cultures for discourse, teachers must implement  norms to support students’ engagement with one another during the discussion.

In order to facilitate meaningful discourse teachers should be:

• Engaging students in the purposeful sharing of ideas and reasoning
• Selecting and sequencing student work and responses for whole class sharing
• Facilitating discussion among students using student work and responses
• Making connections between student work and responses that drive towards the instructional goals

In order to engage in meaningful discourse students should be:

• Presenting and explaining their work
• Listening to and critiquing the reasoning of their peers
• Making sense of their peers' reasoning by asking questions, trying new approaches, or sharing the connections between this approach and their own. 
• Comparing and contrasting multiple perspectives.