Talk Talk

Being in a first grade classroom it is difficult because most classroom discussions are simply blurt out. In Chapter 2 it talked about how collaborative efforts among students can produce better answers, but to me, this is something that wouldn't work for younger kids. Whenever the students in my class work together the only thing that gets accomplished is the class gets off task. I do however, see the benefits of this in older grades. I loved the idea of after giving instructions, have one of the students recite them and write them on the board. This helps the students have one of their peers explain to their classmates and then it might be easier for them to understand.

I also think that the Teacher Guided Reporting could be a helpful tool to put in the teacher toolbox. I think that by doing this it helps mapout how you want a discussion to go, yet with the commentary column gives the flexibility to tinker to what the student needs.

Being in a first grade class, I have observed that the teacher tries to get all the students involved, but this can lead to a slew of headaches. As hard as you try to keep the students on track, there are always a handful of students who raise their hands to tell you what they did the past weekend. This is extremely hard to deal with because it easily takes the whole class off track. This also leads to only the students we know traditionally have the correct answer on more often. There has to be a balance of how to handle this, but I do fully understand how difficult it would be to combat this tendency, even though it it completely necessary.