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How do you take the passion and chatter that K–5 students bring to the classroom and turn it into conversation skills that make them better learners? Academic conversation can help hone speaking and listening, critical thinking, and social-emotional skills, as well as deepen content knowledge. But despite its effectiveness, this kind of purposeful, student-led discussion is rarely taught or used at the elementary level. The mystery for teachers is how to support students at various stages of development and build an environment of trust that lets them cultivate these skills.In Demystifying Discussion, veteran teacher Jennifer Orr gives elementary school teachers a primer on teaching students to engage in student-led academic conversation. The strategies, sample assessments, and example conversations in this book show you how to help young learners get better at sharing, exploring, and synthesizing their individual and collective thinking. You'll also learn how to manage different perspectives and disagreements among students.This is a book to use all year long to improve classroom discussion, hone students'skills (and your own), and enhance students'overall learning throughout their time in school and beyond.

This accessible text will show students and class teachers how they can enable their pupils to become critical thinkers through the medium of picturebooks. By introducing children to the notion of making-meaning together through thinking and discussion, Roche focuses on carefully chosen picturebooks as a stimulus for discussion, and shows how they can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to literacy skills, while at the same time developing in pupils a far wider range of literary understanding.By allowing time for thinking about and digesting the pictures as well as the text, and then engaging pupils in classroom discussion, this book highlights a powerful means of developing children's oral language ability, critical thinking, and visual literacy, while also acting as a rich resource for developing children's literary understanding. Throughout, Roche provides rich data and examples from real classroom practice.This book also provides an overview of recent international research on doing ‘interactive read alouds', on what critical literacy means, on what critical thinking means and on picturebooks themselves. Lecturers on teacher education courses for early years or primary levels, classroom teachers, pre-service education students, and all those interested in promoting critical engagement and dialogue about literature will find this an engaging and very insightful text.

In a world of rapidly changing knowledge which requires new and transferable skills, classrooms are increasingly being viewed as places where pupils learn how to learn. In order to help pupils develop new skills, teachers must encourage them to work independently and manage themselves as learners. Learning for Themselves offers teachers a repertoire of effective strategies and frameworks to nurture independent learning. The chapters are organised into four broad areas: learning preferences thinking inquiry personal challenges. Each section includes learning tasks covering commonly addressed topics in primary school curriculums, with each task designed to be adapted by students and teachers to suit particular interests and a range of teaching and learning goals. Photocopiable learning proformas for each task, and additional proforma resources are included to assist teachers and pupils when planning, managing, monitoring and keeping records associated with independent learning. Saving valuable planning time for teachers, this book offers a creative and effective way to encourage pupil's independence and will appeal to all teachers who aim to equip their pupils with transferable skills.

Classroom questions have traditionally focussed on testing the recall, understanding and application of content and methods. Research suggests that pupils require activities that encourage them to think flexibly about possibilities and to make independent judgements about information. Tricky Thinking Problems explores the advancement of creative and critical thinking, and the activities are designed to help pupils test and develop such processes. A series of fascinating challenges are used to stimulate cognitive organisation in areas such as categories, similarities, differences, ordering, analysing, predicting and many more. Pupils will enjoy developing their range of different thinking skills as they complete the resources based on topics such as animals, weather, communications and food. Rather than being told which particular thinking skill to use, the questions are designed to encourage pupils to pick and choose a range of skills and apply them creatively. The resources are fully photocopiable and are suitable for 6 -11 year olds.