Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings

Where would we be without conversation? Throughout history, conversations have allowed us to see different perspectives, build ideas, and solve problems. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk That Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings, Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford dig into back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging and negotiating relevant issues.

Academic Conversations identifies five core communication skills to help students hold productive academic conversations across content areas. These skills are:

• Elaborating and clarifying
• Supporting ideas with evidence
• Building on and/or challenging ideas
• Paraphrasing
• Synthesizing

Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each of the conversation skills, strategies for crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and examples of how to use conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers and in-depth and practical approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

Jeff Zwiers, Ed.D., is a senior researcher at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He has taught in diverse elementary and secondary schools and has worked as an instructional coach in urban school settings. His current research and professional development work consist of collaborating with teachers to learn what works best in real classrooms to help students learn through rich interactions and conversations.