LLED 360

So I want to just throw this out there: does anyone else find this book to be the plethora of possible teaching activities? I mean this thing is the holy grail of do’s and don’ts as a teacher. Pretty epic in my mind. Anyways group work, it’s a fail, succeed or kinda sorta work activity that requires way more thought then most people think. There are so many factors that go into a good discussion and this chapter does a really effective job of covering some of the major stepping stones required to build good classroom discussions. I would personally like to focus on one, which intrigued me. This idea of promoting and fostering proper classroom discussion across multiple subjects and years. As teachers we can come up with the best questions, perfect ways to present findings and the safest environments to have discussions; but if students aren’t exposed to discussions throughout their day or throughout their schooling career, how can we expect them to know what to do? Many students are very apprehensive about jumping into a discussion even amongst close friends or small groups, quite often because they’ve never really given it a try and the idea is some what scary and novel to them. I believe to promote engaging and student orientated discussions we need to foster the ideas of what makes a good discussion early on in education. If a grade 8 student is introduced to discussion based talks that encompass many of the ideas for a good discussion it is likely to start out slow and gradually build. If these same ideas are promoted and instilled from classroom to subject to year, imagine the types of discussions we could be having in grades 11 and 12? I don’t think this is an easy task, nor will it happen overnight, but I firmly believe if schools want to promote discussion it needs to be done school wide and developed over many years, not just one teacher, in one subject, for one year of their high school or middle school life.