E-raamat: Next Steps with Academic Conversations: New Ideas for Improving Learning Through Classroom Talk

In this follow-up to his Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings, the author offers a guide to improving the quality and quantity of productive conversations in classroom lessons, to develop students' content understandings, thinking skills, and language, as well as teach them to deal with challenges and build relationships, empathy, and social skills. He builds on ideas from his previous book to discuss an updated synthesis of conversation work in classrooms, recent classroom-based research and theory on classroom conversations, answers to questions that have emerged during conversation work, and new classroom strategies and practices for fostering classroom conversations. He details the core conversation skills to be developed during lessons; what it means to build ideas in conversation; how to foster students' collaborative, rather than competitive, argumentation skills; discipline-specific conversation strategies and how to develop effective conversation prompts across grade levels and subject areas; formative and summative assessment practices; and key steps needed to cultivate a classroom culture of conversation. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Jeff Zwiers, an educational researcher at Stanford University, has spent the last 15 years analyzing classroom conversations to see how they can be better used and improved in classroom settings. Teachers who have worked with him report significant growth in students’ engagement, content learning, language, creativity, and sense of agency.

Jeff shared his initial vision for classroom conversations in his 2011 book, Academic Conversations. In this follow-up book, Next Steps with Academic Conversations, he builds on those original ideas by offering:

• an updated synthesis of conversation work across disciplines and grade levels

• highlights of the most recent classroom-based research and theory on classroom conversation

• answers to questions that have emerged during this work with teachers and administrators

• new classroom strategies and practices for fostering and assessing classroom conversations

This resource is the product of his extensive research, co-teaching, and collaborating with a wide range of educators. It was written for busy teachers who want a practical guide for strengthening the quality and quantity of productive conversations in their lessons.