Cynthia Greenleaf

Last Thursday we were lucky enough to be invited to Pt England school to hear Cynthia talk about using oral language and discussion to build reading comprehension.
She talked about building students knowledge through reasoned discussion, that is having an evidence based argument. Student should be able to weigh up all the different perspectives of an issue making this different to persuasion, which is what our students (and myself as a teacher) usually default to. For this to be successful the topic or event or picture needs to be of interest and able to be investigated and researched.

In the classroom students need to have abundant opportunities to discuss. Students can look at a topic, find evidence and add their perspective. This is building important life skills as conversations rehearse having multiple perspectives.

A strategy shared was one I have used before but was reminded of how powerful it can be, when student report back to the group not their own idea but one from someone else in the group. This can be a great strategy to ensure that they listen to whet each other has to say. It also helps students won are unsure of putting their own ideas forward as they are reporting back what someone else has said.

One of the other ideas we talked about really made strong connections with what we have been talking about in reading; making text sets. Cynthia talked about resourcing the discussion in layers. Using visuals and text. This way we can scaffold learners' entry into the discussion

I am looking at these great ideas as I move with my students into the final term of the year. I really like the idea of choosing a visual along with a current event so that students can research multiple points of view before the discussion. I can see this working well as a lead in to the discussion chains we have been doing.