For my field placement, I am currently in a kindergarten classroom. There is a lot of classroom talk that appears to occur regularly throughout the course of the day. Much of the talk is done as a whole class rather than small groups because of the students young age. My CT mainly implements the use of response centered talks with some discussion and recitation. The response centered talks seem to be the most effective because it keeps the students actively participating rather than just listening. My CT uses various probing questions about the text or illustrations to engage the children and activate their prior knowledge. I notice in her discussions she typically follows the IC model found in the Goldenberg article, to structure her discussions. She will provide the students with both background knowledge as well as connect the text to previous curriculum so the students can make their own connections. When she leads response based discussions, my CT actively involves as many of the students to keep them focused. A specific example was a math discussion my CT lead last week on shapes. She held an active discussion and involved the children by having them come to the board and point out a specific shape in a picture on at a time.
Throughout the course and into my internship next year, I would like to deepen my experiences with various forms of discussions in the classroom. I sometimes find myself nervous or anxious to teach because I am unsure of what to expect from the students in a discussion. I am especially concerned about keeping all of the students actively involved regardless of their ability level. How do you keep more advanced students involved and the less advanced students able to understand?
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Since we're in the same classroom, I've obviously noticed a lot of the same things. I usually don't think I would be a big fan of the way our teacher uses discussion. I think that she sometimes needs to possibly let the children talk more, but for some reason it really seems to work with our students. I like how you pointed out that our CT uses probing questions. I usually would just see our teacher as asking questions to keep the students engaged, but when put in these terms, I can see how she is actually having a worthwhile discussion. Like you, I like how she draws out the children's prior knowledge in these discussions. I can see her possibly using this same method to assess their progress further into this semester. Also like you, I want to see more types of discussion in my internship next year. It would be interesting to see how other kindergarten teachers hold discussions or recitations with a different class.
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