Conversations with focal students

My conversations with my focal students definitely illuminated some key gaps between what I hoped to communicate and what my students actually understood about what a good partner share in Reading Workshop looks like. For the past several weeks, I have been talking frequently with my students about how we "grow ideas" together: how when one person shares the seed of an idea about their reading, a good listener will hear that seed, and build on it, back and forth until the idea becomes well developed. I've stressed that a good conversation doesn't just involve people taking turns talking or retelling, that it should be a real dialogue, with both partners helping each other to develop big ideas. We've practice that in whole-class discussions as well as fishbowl discussions, with a small group in the middle talking and an outer circle observing.

But when I asked my focal students what a good partner share looks like, their responses surprised me. One student talked about how in a good partner share, both partners talk for a long time. He also mentioned that reading partners should ask each other specific questions about what happened in the book. Another student told me that reading partners should tell who the characters are and what happened — in other words, a basic retelling. None of the students talked about growing a big idea about a character, or about listening to their partner's idea and building on it: the two points I have been most focused on teaching in the past few weeks.

This makes me think that students' ideas about dialogue around reading are deeply entrenched, and that I will need to do even more explicit modeling and teaching in order to build students' understanding of what high-quality dialogue looks like. I'd be interested to do some contrastive analysis with students of two different conversations: one focused on partners retelling and asking clarifying questions, and one in which partners have a back-and-forth that results in higher-level analysis. I think I should also involve students in creating a rubric for discussions about reading: we could use the same rubric for students to self assess their conversations with partners, in book clubs, and in whole class discussions.