Increasing Student Talk: Part 1 - Conversation/Sentence Starters

Throughout the school year, I will be focusing on how we can increase student talk in our school.  I hope to provide quick and easy strategies for you to implement in your classrooms and lessons to increase the quality and quantity of student talk.  Because, as we all know, students develop a deeper understanding of a topic if they talk about it.

The first strategy is to teach students conversation or sentence starters to use during class discussions, small group conversations, and socratic seminars/debates.  These sentence starters could be general to be used daily in your classroom, or specific to the type of "student talk" they will be doing.  Sentence starters can be made into anchor charts, posted around your classroom, or taped to the top of students desks for quick reference.  Many times, student talk gets stalled because students don't know how to properly construct a response to a prompt or another student's comment.  If we teach students how to have discussions and give them good sentence starters if they get stuck, the hope is, the student talk will be more engaging for them and students will get more out of the talk.

The pictures included are different ideas of "student talk" anchor charts you could create with your students.  Or use to teach students how to improve their ability to discuss topics in your class.  There are many resources online for you get started with ideas, just start looking!

When deciding what sentence starters or stems to use, be sure to think about the students in your class and the type of discussions in which they will be using them.  Do not provide too many to lower level students and be sure to provide ones that meet the current need of the class.  This should be a work in progress for your class and a skill to develop throughout the entire year.