What is teaching? I mean really. Is it about teaching kids the presidents, math facts, and enlightening them with rich literature? These things happen, but ideally we are teaching our students to think. To be able to think, understand important and ideas and to reason is to thrive in our world. To be literate is all sense of what needs to be read and understand in the world we live in. As it sounds, it is an ever-encompassing difficult task that we as teachers have at hand. This leads me then to my thoughts in regards to instructional conversations in the classroom. Research has shown that what students analyze, think critically about and then teach others is what they most deeply understand and remember most. This makes sense. It then makes sense that we should aim to encourage this type of engagement in the classroom. Of course content first has to be taught in order to have a basis of information from which to gather and pull conclusions and thoughts. From there though we must teach students to reflect, question and reason with each other. This is the main idea of instructional conversations.
While this sounds like something that could only take place in the upper levels, it is amazing students of all ages are capable of this. Although their ideas were more surface, and in regards to more simply put ideas, the concepts were their and my group of first graders excelled. This led me to think that we are such natural born thinkers. What I mean by this is that at first grade they thrive through sharing and communicating their thoughts. They are not afraid to disagree with their peers and have simply no hesitation. Somewhere along the way it seems this gets lost and it is important that we continually nurture this type of thought process and conversation throughout all ages of students.
So my first graders were reading the book Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Carnival Prize for their literacy Circle. We had read the first four chapters and had previous lessons on making connections with you, other texts and the world around us. They instantly took off with the conversation. They began by making connections with the carnival and their own school carnival. This led to conversation on the bike and how it was stolen. One kid mentioned that her brother’s bike had also been stolen. Another kid chimed in and mentioned that the bike wasn’t locked up so it was easy for someone to take. They then discussed that just because it was easy to take that didn’t necessarily mean it was right for the unknown person to take it. It was a small group of 6 kids and all were eager to share their ideas and thoughts on the matter. Without much instruction on how this was to go, they pretended like I wasn’t even in the room. I interjected only to bring them back to their own reflective ideas when a student would bring up silly ideas as first graders usually do. Overall I had a very positive and successful experience and I can’t wait to use this learning strategy in my future classroom.
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
― Socrates
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