Turn and Talks in the Classroom - Part 1

During read aloud, as well as during other parts of the day, we ask students to turn and talk to each other.  We all know that some students raise their hand and answer questions every time they get a chance and some students never volunteer. When we ask students to turn and talk, students practice organizing and verbalizing their thoughts and they also practice listening and asking questions.

Here are some important points I’ve noticed that help turn and talks be important learning opportunities for students:

Questions should be open-ended questions and require higher order thinking. Some generic questions that tend to work well are:           

o   Why do you think the character acted the way that he/she did?

o   What changes are you noticing in the character?

o   What message is the author teaching you through the events of the story or the changes in the characters?

o   What does this make you realize or think about people and life?

Higher order thinking questions can also be integrated into other academic subjects to generate opportunities for turn and talks. For example,

o   What do you predict will happen in this science experiment?

o   Talk about different ways you could organize the data.

In other subjects, the responses reflect important understandings that I want my students to have:

o   What are some important features that graphs and tables should have?

o   How are squares, rectangles, rhombuses and parallelograms alike and different?

o   What are some important features that graphs and tables should have?

o   How are squares, rectangles, rhombuses and parallelograms alike and different?

When I think about how to evaluate whether a question is “turn and talk-worthy”, I try to imagine how I would answer the question. Do I have to stop and think about the answer? Could there be different “right” answers? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then the turn and talk has the potential to be meaningful to students.