EDSE 509 - Facilitating Communication: Accountable Talk for Elementary Students (3)

Modern teaching best practices emphasize making the classroom more student centered-that is, giving students more opportunities to talk and collaborate as they discover and explore new concepts. However, as a teacher, you know that undirected conversation can quickly divert into distractions and off-topic chatting. Accountable talk serves as a framework to focus and enrich students’ conversations, and this course will show you how to successfully implement it in your elementary classroom.

Through an interactive and hands-on approach, you will investigate accountable talk and how to structure it to best facilitate meaningful and purposeful academic conversations. You’ll learn how to help students think more critically and analytically and to make personal and authentic connections to what they’re learning. By the end of the course, you’ll have a set of activities, scaffolding devices, and graphic organizers that you can start using with your students immediately. 

Using the techniques from this course, you will be able to guide your students to richer and more purposeful learning through the power of focused, high-level conversation with both you and their peers.