Developing the Ability to Talk in Today's World

"Clearly, the path toward creating a future filled with opportunity and choice for our children is paved with the ability to think and talk with others in purposeful ways as a means of generating ideas and constructing understanding."  This quote from this weeks chapter in Comprehension Through Conversation, got us reflecting on the work we did in this week's professional development session.  In that session, we were placed in large groups made up of teachers we were unfamiliar with.  Our discussion revealed struggles to make the time purposeful and walk away with new understanding due to the fact that we were unfamiliar with the members of our group and uncomfortable in the environments we were placed in.  We were not all able to get past the discomfort to get to collective action.  We did not negotiate or construct meaning as a group and ended up feeling frustrated and fractured.  As we shared this, we realized the setting we were currently in was one of comfort and safety, thus talk flowed freely and guards were down.  Listening, acknowledging and disagreeing came naturally because of the familiarity. This understanding led us to think about how we group kids to have conversations and how sometimes we naturally discourage friends who talk from being in groups.  We often place kids in groups with others they are unfamiliar with, have never worked with and therefore not as comfortable with.  The willingness to share and receive messages is inhibited.  Don't get me wrong, we're not going to go and group kids by social groups, but it did cause us to think more purposefully and flexibly about who we put together in order to create the deepest conversations.  Choice about topic and group can give kids a level of support that allows the sharing of ideas and receipt of messages to be encouraged. We might even be charged to think about purposeful grouping as a scaffold for instruction. After all, "Children do not need, nor can they afford, to wait until high school or beyond to learn to use talk in purposeful ways."  After our experience on Monday, this could not be  more clear!