STRATEGY FOCUS
SILENT CONVERSATION
PURPOSE
Silent Conversation is a strategy that allows for all students to be engaged, including those who may be reluctant to share thinking out loud during class discussions and encourages more vocal students to listen to their quieter peers. Additionally, Silent Conversation slows down students’ thinking, allowing them to
process information and collect their thoughts prior to sharing, as well as gain
insight into other’s thinking.
PROCESS
- Provide students with a guiding question, prompt, or statement based on an artifact that will promote critical thinking, personal connections, and/or a deep reflection on key concepts. The artifact should be representative of critical content (i.e., text, picture, quote, cartoon, map, etc.).
- Divide students into groups of four to six per group. Prepare a sheet of paper for each student with the artifact and question/prompt/statement you have designed.
- Each student will respond in writing to the prompt on their individual sheet of paper in a set amount of time. Remind students that Silent Conversations are indeed silent and that there should be no talking.
- Students then pass their paper to the next student. Each student then reads the written response of their peer and responds to their thinking on the same sheet of paper. This process continues until all students in the group have read and responded to all individual pieces of paper.
- The teacher and students engage in whole group discussion to share the new learning, ideas, and provoking questions they encountered during the process as a way to synthesize the learning activity.
PROBING QUESTIONS
CONSIDERATIONS
- What did you learn from someone else?
- How was your thinking similar or different from someone else?
- How did this process enhance your listening skills?
- Setting a timer for each round of Silent Conversation might help students maintain better focus throughout the process. Be mindful that what may seem like too much time could actually encourage students to go deeper in their thought process and add more to their initial response.
- Students can engage in Silent Conversation in pairs instead of small groups. Each student simultaneously responds to the prompt posed by the teacher on a smaller paper, such as notebook paper or an index card. Once time is up, they switch paper with their partner and respond. Back and forth conversation can take place for a few rounds.
- Silent Conversation can be done in a whole group in which each student begins with their own piece of paper, as written above, but is then shared around the room, similar to a Write Around, in which all students respond to every paper.
- Silent Conversation can be used to activate prior knowledge at the beginning of a new unit of study or lesson, to synthesize new learning throughout a unit of study or summarize content at the end of a lesson.
- Silent Conversation, when done as written above in small groups on large pieces of paper, can then serve as content for a Gallery Walk.
SCAFFOLDS
General Scaffolds
- Model how to write a response.
- Show student samples of responses.
- Provide examples of what student responses might look like.
- Provide sentence starters to help students get started:
- Reading this text made me think about…
- The most important idea in the text for me was _____ because…
- I was surprised by ______ because…
- This piece helped me understand ______ .
- I agree (do not agree) with _____ because…
- I want to know more about _____ because…
- Encourage and allow students to access and use vocabulary resources and tools such as anchor charts, word walls, word bank, and personal dictionaries.
- Provide students with sufficient time to think and write.
- Provide opportunities for students to respond in a variety of ways (e.g., pictures, text, mix of English and home language, etc.)
- Different types of texts can be used for this strategy. Instead of reading a passage, students watch a video clip or view images such as photographs or art.
- Create a list of question starters for students to use until they can create questions on their own.
- Model an example of what questions and responses might look/sound like prior to asking students to engage in strategy.
- Provide additional wait time for students to process, think, write, read.
- Provide sentence stems and frames to help students engage in Academic Dialogue with their peers. Examples:
- What do you notice?
- How might you summarize this statement?
- What new questions do you have?
- How has your opinion changed?
Scaffolds for Multilingual Learners
Entering/Emerging:
- Allow students to access and use vocabulary resources in order to recount, argue, and explain.
- Model how to write a variety of responses.
- Provide examples of what students’ responses might look like
- Allow students to respond in a variety of ways (e.g., pictures, text, mix of English and home language, etc.).
- Provide sentence stems/frames and graphic organizers.
- Provide visual support (e.g., posters, photographs) for students to name and briefly describe objects, people, or places
- Provide sentence stems and frames for stating main ideas and/or restating details of content-related topics, as well as connecting ideas to one’s experiences (in home language and English).
- Provide frequent opportunities for students to participate in both structured and less structured dialogue.
- Provide time for students to think and create an oral response (in home language and English).
- Model appropriate nonverbal behaviors to show engagement and listening.
Developing/Expanding:
- Model how to write a variety of responses.
- Provide examples of information presented objectively with a neutral tone.
- Provide graphic organizers.
- Model how to summarize evidence and evaluate and challenge evidence presented in an argument.
- Provide examples of transitions to help students connect ideas.
- Model examples of paraphrases and summaries that are presented orally.
- Provide sentence stems and frames for questions.
- Provide examples of clarifying questions that students might ask.
- Model how to generate new questions to maintain conversations.
Bridging/Reaching:
- Provide examples of students’ responses.
- Model how to write a concluding statement that follows from and supports the information presented.
- Model how to convey sequence and show relationships among experiences and events.
CONTENT APPLICATIONS
SOCIAL STUDIES
Students are provided with a primary source and write to explain what they notice about it, what purpose they believe it served, or why it is significant to the current unit of study.
VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS
Students are presented with the question, “How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art?”
CAREER & TECHNICAL EDUCATION
In a nursing class, students are provided with a realistic scenario nurses encounter and respond with how they would respond using knowledge from what they’ve learned in class.
WORLD LANGAUGES
Students are given a contextual situation in the target language and respond to it in the target language.
HEALTH & PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Students are provided with a contextual situation regarding a specific health concern (i.e. exercise or nutrition) and respond with how they might deal with the situation using knowledge from a current or recent unit of study.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS
After reading a class text, students share which character they think changed the most and respond to each other’s responses as if they strongly disagree and provide evidence as support.
SCIENCE
When studying a unit on light and matter, students respond to the question, “why do we sometimes see different things when looking at the same object?”
MATHEMATICS
Students are provided with an equation and use words to explain how they would go about solving it.