Thursday, August 29, 2013

My Partner Said
My Partner Wondered

Earlier this week as I walked by one of our new enthusiastic teachers I noticed some of my gifted and advanced kids participating in the classroom discussion. As I continued to observe it became more and more apparent that the discussion was mostly between two students and the teacher. I thought back to when I had a classroom and how there were kids who pretty much dominated most of the speaking time while many of the quieter, more reflective students never inserted their voice into the stream of thinking. I wish I would have known Linda Hoyt's "My Partner Said" Strategy and its variation, "My Partner Wondered." 

The Idaho Core includes Speaking and Listening Standards. Truthfully, there have always been similar standards but now we must leverage speaking and listening in our collaborative classrooms to facilitate reading, writing, and math thinking. We need to utilize strategies so students learn to listen and speak. All students need a voice in our classrooms.

The Idaho Core Speaking and Listening Anchor Standard states:

Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

Therefore, we must engage even our reluctant speakers and cultivate listening skills. We have shared "My Partner Said" in many of our trainings and in our work in classrooms, but we have many new teachers. And, it's always a good reminder for us veteran teachers! Here are the anchor charts for the two strategies:

We know some of our G/T students tend to know the answers and are used to speaking (and even overspeaking!) while other students passively let them. Also, a few students take a while to articulate their thoughts. Using Linda Hoyt's strategies will help balance out our classroom discussions.

The wonderful, new teacher I mentioned in the first paragraph found me later this week to tell me how successful the strategy worked. She said that at first the dominant speakers said their partners had nothing to say but they had some important information to share. Well, of course they did, as some of these kids are used to speaking up without having to listen to the ideas of others! With determined nudging and consistent practice, other students are starting to speak up and all students are having to listen and encourage responses, in order to know what their partners said. 

On a side note, I sat in Cheryl Forse's classroom this morning and had the chance to be an elbow partner. When I shared out what my partner said I saw a pleased look on the face of my fellow partner. The next time we had to turn and talk, he made sure to talk more than he had the first time.  I think he was hoping I'd share his ideas again.

Speaking of Linda Hoyt, we are giving away one of her excellent books, which includes many writing strategies for non-fiction. But you have to follow our blog by tomorrow!  

Stay tuned for our announcement of the lucky winner tomorrow.

Did that get your attention?  We hope so!  Follow this blog by email, before Friday, August 30 and we will add you to a drawing for this book. If you already own it, we'll find a different book for you...equally as full of great ideas for writing.

  

This summer, my niece Addie(Angie speaking), when asked, "What's the magic word?" would answer "Abba Dabba!"  The first time she said it, it was more like "Abba Dabba??", but we all laughed so hard she has continued to use it for our attention (mainly her Grampy's).  The point of this story is that we were working hard with 3 year old Addie to get her to say "Please" and we were doing it with a specific expectation and oral rehersal.

With the new Idaho Core standards, Jayna and I are becoming more and more convinced of the importance of taking kids from oral rehersals of ideas and evidence to the written.  Launching them into the written too soon causes frustration and a lot of wasted "writing" time.  By working to meet the speaking and listening standards of the Idaho Core, we are really scaffolding kids into writing in a very research proven way.

But, much like Addie, kids don't always have the words.  They need rehersal and prompting for having discussions!  Their models of 'good' argument might be few.  So we want to advocate helping give kids the words through Discussion Stems.  That takes us to the 2nd Give Away.  Jackie Miller shared a great list of stems with the participants in her session last week.  Here's that list plus a few.  We'll be adding more and updating the list throughout the year.

Happy Back to School!

Angie and Jayna

Welcome Back!  We hope it's been a great summer for you and your family and that you are feeling refreshed and ready to get back to school.

As we gear back up we wanted to take a few minutes to share our big goals and guidelines for the year.  Our main goal is to support you as you work towards meeting the needs of your gifted and advanced students.  In the days to come, we will be establishing schedules with you and your team and wrapping up testing with incoming second graders (and a few others.)  We will also be bringing you new, online referral forms to make things a little easier on you and to save a little paper.

Jayna and I have been doing a lot of thinking and training with elementary teachers in the area of argument/opinion writing and reading for evidence.  We are looking forward to share ideas with you and trying out new strategies with you kids.

If there is something we can help you with right away, please, don't hesitate to send us an email.

Here's to a great year!

Angie (and Jayna)