Casey Cuny was frustrated with the lack of depth in his high school English students' writing. He'd heard about Socratic seminars but was reluctant to try them until he saw them in action. He decided to conduct Socratic seminars with his students centered on the question, What is the value of life? In past years, student papers on this…

A teacher is doing something right when his high school students--kids with limited English, no less--form groups and begin discussing a lesson on quadratic equations at the start of class, without any teacher direction. Bondie, Gaughran, and Zusho describe "discussion routines" that teachers at International Community High School in the…

Why should teachers bother with student-driven discussions? Elizabeth A. City offers three reasons: (1) talking and thinking reinforce each other; (2) dialogue is a necessary skill of democracy, so schools should teach thinking, speaking, and listening as "practices of freedom"; and (3) student-driven talk is fun. Yet student-driven…

Skills in communication and collaboration can be just as important as content knowledge and technical skills in the workplace. So what are schools doing to foster these skills? English language arts teacher Alexis Wiggins adapted the Socratic seminar model to make it student-led and collaborative. Under her new approach, the Spider Web…

What happens in classrooms when we create the time and space for authentic talk about texts? Extended, collaborative conversations that allow understanding to unfold over time can be messy and dynamic. As students wrestle with complex texts and ideas, talk can become lively--and predictable problems can arise. In this article, Marie Nichols uses…

"Reader, say something smart. Right now. Share a deep insight or a subtle point. Quick. No? OK (with obvious disappointment), I'll come back to you later. Anybody else?" We've all experienced this in school, the author notes--the teacher giving up, concluding that we weren't going to say something smart in the allotted…

Feedback is certainly about saying or writing helpful, learning-focused comments. But that is only part of it. What happens beforehand? What happens afterward? Feedback that is helpful and learning-focused fits into a context. Before a teacher gives feedback, students need to know the learning target so they have a purpose for using the feedback…

Just as a thermostat adjusts room temperature, effective feedback helps maintain a supportive environment for learning. Because of the many factors affecting how recipients respond to feedback, research offers no simple prescription for making feedback work effectively. What works in one classroom for one teacher will not work for another teacher.…

Feedback plays a crucial role in bringing about learning gains. However, Lorrie Shepard (2001), in summarizing Kluger and De Nisi's meta-analysis on feedback research, points out that only in about one-third of the 131 studies examined did feedback improve learning. It turns out that it is not the "giving" of feedback that causes learning gains,…

Ask any teacher what he or she needs more of, and it is a good bet that time will top the list. Anything that promises to recoup a little bit of their workday time is sure to be a best seller. One overlooked time-saver is in how they use feedback. Teachers know that feedback is important for teaching and learning. Unfortunately, most secondary…

In this article, the author shares her experience that illustrates that the feedback students give is just as important as the feedback they get. For her, the idea that students giving her feedback was more powerful than her giving them feedback sounded too good to be true. If she could come up with a system to regularly collect feedback that did…

Every student experiences feedback in different ways, and there is a real trick to knowing when no feedback is needed. Feedback of any kind can sometimes paralyze a student, interrupting the flow of his or her work. Teachers need to understand and recognize when and why this happens. The author's sketch of three goals for giving feedback in this…

"Total participation techniques" provide teachers with evidence of active participation and cognitive engagement from all students at the same time. These techniques function as formative assessments that help teachers accurately monitor progress, provide feedback, and modify instruction. Compared with the traditional question-and-answer scenario,…

Madison Elementary School, a K-6 school of 335 students in Marshfield, Wisconsin, recognizes the value of student feedback and strives to learn more through monthly student meetings, whole-class sit-downs, and student exit interviews. As the principal of Madison Elementary School, the author meets with a group of students for half an hour during…

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at MIT, designed ELIZA in 1964 as an experiment in artificial intelligence. ELIZA was constructed with a library of ready-made questions that could be summoned at a moment's notice in response to human input. When users' statements fell outside the program's scripting, ELIZA could adapt by rephrasing the words into a…