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Title of Book: Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings
Bibliography for Book: Zwiers, Jeff, and Marie Crawford. Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2011.
Authors and Bios: Jeff Zwiers currently teaches in the Stanford Teacher Education Program and works as a clinical associate for Stanford's Center to Support Excellence in Teaching. He consults for international education development projects that promote bilingual education, curriculum development, formative assessment, and engaged learning. He has published articles and books on reading, thinking, and academic language such as Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms (2008). His most recent book, Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings, focuses on teaching students how to skillfully communicate and build content understandings within the classroom community.
Marie Crawford is an assistant principal in the San Carlos School District. She is an experienced mentor teacher, classroom teacher, and museum educator.
Summary of Book: Learning is a social endeavor, and conversations, especially academic conversations, help students to deepen their understanding of a topic in a profound and meaningful way. Academic conversations are those back and forth dialogues that occur in a supportive and purposeful classroom environment. They help students focus on a topic and explore it, while building, challenging, challenging, and negotiating important ideas with their peers.
Classroom talk and discussion is usually teacher-dominated. In fact, most classrooms spend less than two minutes per hour on classroom conversation or discussion. Most talk does not advance beyond short question and answer sessions because teachers have never learned how to initiate and maintain effective academic conversations in the classroom. There are five core communication skills that help students hold productive academic conversations across academic cont
ntent areas. These skills
include: elaborating and clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building and/or challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing. This book explains how to weave these skills into all teaching practices and approaches. Specifically, this book helps teachers to use conversations to build the following:
• •
• •
Academic vocabulary and grammar
Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application
Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing
Complex and abstract essential understandings in content areas such as adaptation, human nature, bias, conservation of mass, energy, gravity, irony, democracy, greed, and more
Visit our website to download a free Professional Book Discussion Guide for Academic Conversations by Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford. See below for more information.
Zaner-Bloser Professional Development’s Discussion Guides provide direction for conversations about some of the best, most popular professional books. They are excellent tools for ongoing, job-embedded professional development in your learning community or school. Written by our knowledgeable consultants, these Guides will take you and your colleagues through a series of before-, during-, and after-reading questions that encourage meaningful conversation and valuable collaboration. Titles include, but are not limited to:
Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing? Collaborating in Class and Online by Julie D. Ramsay
Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling & Mentor Texts by Kelly Gallagher
Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4–12 by Kelly Gallagher
Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Diane Lapp
A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades by Georgia Heard and Jennifer McDonough
Visit
www.zaner-bloser.com/ProfessionalDevelopment to download a free Discussion Guide for the titles above—and many more—to share with your learning community and kick-start your professional learning today!
Order online at
www.zaner-bloser.com 73 Asking Better Questions by Norah Morgan and Juliana Saxton
No More “I’m Done”: Fostering Independent Writers in the Primary Grades by Jennifer Jacobson
Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary by Janet Allen
Reality Checks: Teaching Reading Comprehension with Nonfiction, K–5 by Tony Snead When Writing Workshop Isn’t Working by Mark Overmeyer
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
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