Extended Discussion

The development and use of extended discussion as a strategy to improve critical thinking, listening and oral language skills has been a focus for a couple of years now at our school. I am familiar with this approach as I was fortunate enough to work with teaching expert Anne Sinclair a few years ago when we used paideia style seminars with extension students. Although this approach was very successful with the extension students (18 high achieving students), I found it more difficult to implement in a class of 30 students with varied needs.

Manaiakalani created the ‘6 ground rules for talk’ strategy to help implement extended discussion in our classrooms. Although I provided opportunities for extended discussion during literacy sessions at the start of the year, it was not utilised as effectively as it could have been. However, when my team leader (Rob Wiseman/Team 5) created a template using google slides to ‘gamify’ extended discussion, it proved to be very popular and effective with my students, especially the boys.

I modified Rob’s template slightly to create my ‘Extended Discussion with Neo’ template. This involves the students having to talk as much as they could about the text using the 6 grounds rules for talk. The aim was to avoid teacher intervention in the discussion, and to avoid losing the three cases of gold to Neo (character from the Matrix).

One of the best outcomes from this experience was when a student who is in my lowest reading group (reading at 7.5 years old) was able to join students from a higher ability group, and talk confidently about the text and about themes related to the text. This helped to develop the child’s confidence and his ability to see himself as contributing something of value to the group, even though he has issues with decoding simpler texts, and struggled in the past to stay focused and motivated.