Collaborative Conversations with Kagan

Collaborative conversations when done though the proper cooperative learning structures (aka Kagan), can be soooo incredibly powerful for student learning! Powerful AND engaging! My students absolutely love doing collaborative discussions. And you may be thinking, "How is this effective? How is letting the kids talk in groups not a waste of time?" Well I'm gonna show you just how effective it is!

To start, you want to make sure you've constructed appropriate collaborative learning groups.  Meaning you want to have an even mix of High, Low, Medium, GATE, EL, EO students, etc.  This keeps the groups well balanced and supports differentiation of instruction for students at all levels.  They are all able to contribute and learn at their own level, while accessing the same content classroom wide.  This is very important to maximize learning. (To learn more about Cooperative Learning structures, see my previous blog posts here: Cooperative Learning Structures  and also here: More on Cooperative Learning Structures/Kagan)

Once you've  created these evenly balanced groups, you want facilitate team building activities.  These are non-academic activities that help students to get to know each other, and to understand the importance of working together as a team, establishing each of their strength's etc.  These activities could be something like building something, creating something, building words out of letters, etc.  This piece is extremely important to help foster student's sense of belonging, and comfort-ability working with each other.  If you skip this essential step, you will probably not get full participation from ALL of your students within their table groups. (see my previous blog for more info in Team Building here: Team Building with Kagan)

Now you're ready to start collaborative, higher level academic discussions! I also teach the students "accountable talk" sentence frames, so that they know how to have a discussion.  Often times I use the Essential Question from the Wonders ELA curriculum that week as the focus point of the discussion, as well as the reading comprehension skills taught that week.  Or, I have students annotate the text before the discussion and have them use their annotations to guide their discussions.  Often times, I will incorporate all of the above into one lesson/discussion.  I also use the Kagan Software with the random selector tools, to choose students at random to share out after each discussion any random selector software, or even just equity sticks will work!).  The students are taught that they can share their idea or one discussed at their table.  I find that my students are VERY  excited to share their peers' ideas just as much as they are their own.  Through establishing these cooperative learning groups and academic talk, my students are VERY VERY good at complimenting each other, giving each other positive feedback, helping out their peers when in need.  Its really endearing and super cute to watch them.

I  have seen my students year after year, make huge gains and growth in their reading comprehension skills as well as test scores.  Structuring these academic discussions in the correct manner helps facilitate students reading, writing, and research skills, in addition to helping strengthen their speaking and listening skills.  These types of discussions also help students develop a strong understanding of being able to site the text in order to support an original thought or idea of their own.  I encourage you to start using these collaborative discussions in your classroom right away! 

Collaboratively Learning,

Megan Brown

megan.brown@omsd.net