In a gradual release of responsibility, the teacher was there to be supportive, on stand-by to steer the discussion to a productive place, using a technique like what Wood (1998) called self-inhibition. In self-inhibition, the teacher withholds assistance to allow the learner to initiate problem-solving. In this case, the teacher’s self-inhibition allowed students to generate a question that took them deeper into the text, into themes and hidden messages, instead of the shallows of simple recall. Later, Miss Rumphius became a mentor text for them – they returned to it multiple times to compare different aspects of it to other texts. It may be that it was a memorable text because of the high level of engagement they had in leading their own discussion. Again, there are times when we need to support critical thinking with text-dependent questions. There are times when we need to test their ability to recall, make inferences, summarize, identify main ideas and details, and so on, but that’s a different conversation with a different purpose, and students need to understand the difference.
Principle 5: Use conversation to transfer understanding to writing.
Conversation is a powerful tool of transfer. As a reading interventionist, it was important to talk with students about what they were learning in my classroom, and how they were going to approach similar tasks (near transfer) and dissimilar but conceptually related tasks (far transfer) when they went back to the classroom. This teacher-student talk is important because students who struggle have not yet developed flexibility in handling their fragile knowledge of concepts and strategies. Conversations that include some problem-solving and then self-reflection tend to be more metacognitive, whereas just reminding students to do this or that could be forgotten quickly. Not only does teacher language in a conversation setting set the stage for transfer, but conversation can also be used to rehearse messages prior to the cognitive demands of writing. Writing, as mentioned in the Nystrand and Gamoran (1991) study, is an important product of conversation and is the orchestration of all the learner’s thoughts, actions, and experiences. We often use writing as an assessment, but without the opportunity to talk beforehand, it’s not fair to the learner. As an interventionist, I often had my students rehearse their messages before writing, a practice Dorn and Jones (2012) suggest “supports the students’ memory of the language pattern for future predictions. This remembered message is critical, because the children will use it to self-monitor their writing” (p. 70). I also found that rehearsal was important for transferring teachers’ reflections to planning, that teachers valued the practice of rehearsing their language and jotting it immediately on their lesson plans, therefore enhancing their decision-making. (Richardson, 2017).
We know that conversation in traditional ways of teaching has shown to lack opportunities for engagement and transfer. We know by now that this has been shown in past research to have a negative effect on achievement. Now, virtual learning and in-class digital learning further complicates the ongoing and arguably unresolved conversation issues. I propose we start afresh to study the effects of our efforts to prioritize conversation in the context of face-to-face learning. I propose that such prioritization will more efficiently inform the future direction of instructional conversations. Because I am a realist, however, I acknowledge a few caveats. If increasing the quality and quantity of instructional conversations is a priority, then stakeholders would need to agree to concentrate funds for job-embedded professional learning. These stakeholders would need to promise not to change course in the middle of this work to adopt the next new thing. All would need to commit to study and replicate successful classrooms using a high-quality combination of action and quantitative research. If these conditions are met, perhaps then we can directly apply our successful methods for instructional conversations to virtual settings, while maintaining a strong model that will persevere through other educational shifts in the future. If we can accomplish this goal, our instructional conversations will be a true reflection of change.