Course Objectives

• Deepen your understanding of discussion and its value to students' academic and social outcomes.
• Assess the extent to which your current lessons incorporate opportunities for students to engage in discussion.
• Connect the four practices of quality questioning to productive discussion.
• Help your students understand and use think times to sustain their thinking and engagement in discussion.
• Use the three important steps in the framing of a question for discussion in your selected classroom.
• Understand how skills within the social, cognitive, and use-of-knowledge skill sets support student engagement in disciplined and thoughtful discussion.
• Assess proficiency in the skills and dispositions within each of the three skill sets (social, cognitive, and use-of-knowledge) that are most relevant and appropriate to your students, given their age and developmental level and the content area.
• Deepen your knowledge of the strategies, skills, and habits of mind teachers employ to successfully orchestrate a teacher-guided discussion.
• Match specific scaffolds and strategies with common challenges that emerge during classroom discussion.
• Use the Cycle of Discussion and related resources to plan, guide, and reflect on a discussion for your selected class of students.
• Understand the value of structured small-group protocols in engaging all students in deepening their understanding of content being studied and helping students learn, practice, and develop proficiency in key discussion skills.
• Select and use structured small groups with your students for the dual purposes of advancing their mastery of content standards and their proficiency in targeted discussion skills.
• Understand the features of student-driven discussion that enable students to assume responsibility for their own learning and deepen their understanding of academic content.
• Identify behaviors that will help students assume responsibility for directing their own discussions.

Syllabus

(ASCD PD Online course, 2017) Self-paced asynchronous online course. Upon completion, learners will be awarded an ASCD Certificate worth up to 20 Clock Hours.