Another focus is think time. As a teacher, I was consumed with filling the day with activities that were related to the content, often times forgetting to let the students think and talk. As I did some research on how to best help our teachers develop better conversations and discussions, I came across this article about discussion. A Discussion Challenge You Overcame is an article that gives good insight into how to handle some of the challenges in holding discussion in the classroom. Using our data, it was determined that our students needed that time to think before talking, gather their thoughts, and ponder the answer. It is our goal to push our students into better oral conversation with giving them the tools to support and develop their thinking before speaking.
Lastly, we are going to work on our questioning techniques by asking different types of questions such as, open ended questions and divergent questions, to help our student think at a higher level rather than solely focusing on the Bloom's Level. Bloom's was designed as a thinking scale not a questioning scale. Instead of using Bloom's to design questions we will use different question types that produce the thinking at the higher level of Bloom's.
Here are examples of our student support with our 5 Star Answers Rubric and Sentence Frames
