English Language Arts Grade 9-10
Reading: Informational Text Standard 10
English Language Arts Grade 9-10
Speaking and Listening Standard 1 a.
English Language Arts Grade 9-10
Speaking and Listening Standard 1 b.
English Language Arts Grade 9-10
Speaking and Listening Standard 1 c.
English Language Arts Grade 9-10
Speaking and Listening Standard 1 d.
1 class periods of 30 minutes each
Pairs
Students use a structured format (an adaptation of Think-Pair-Share) to discuss and deconstruct complex text.
Copies of a complex text passage
The new core standards emphasize the importance of developing students' speaking and listening skills as well as helping them access complex text through reading, re-reading, re-thinking, and re-examining.
The purpose of this lesson is to get the students to focus and stay on topic while they talk. As a result, students are required to think more extensively about a topic by repeatedly reading and discussing with others.
Students are responsible for summarizing their thinking, understanding their point of view, and developing questions.
Students will be able to stay focused on a topic during discussion, synthesize and summarize the discussion, and develop questions for understanding complex text.
It helps to give struggling students formal sentence frames to help them both in speaking and in writing. Examples of formal sentence frames include the following:
The structured conversation process can be used as a introduction to new material, as a daily warmup to create community, as a method to lead to possible inquiry (based on students' questions).
Allen, Janet. More Tools for Teaching Content Literacy. Stenhouse Publishing, 2005.
Kagen, S. Dimensions of Cooperative Classroom Structures. Plenum, 1985.