Teacher TALK MOVES that drive meaningful classroom discourse
- Probing
- Probing questions or prompts get students to make public more of their thinking.
- Pressing
- Pressing means that the teacher does not allow students to offer shortcut responses, unsupported claims, or respond with “you know.”
- Re-voicing
- Re-voicing means that the teacher paraphrases and re-broadcasts what a student has said, in order to enhance the clarity of that contribution for other students.
- Peer-to-peer talk
- Your students should be developing the civility needed to elaborate on and critique the ideas of others in a public setting—without you acting as an intermediary between every turn of talk.
- Putting ideas on hold
- Marking a student’s idea as something that is not going to be talked about at this point in a respectful way. A teacher might say: “That’s an interesting idea, and it is something that we will talk about tomorrow, but for now…”
- Wait time
- During whole class discussion, students need time to think. Not everyone can spontaneously interpret what a teacher’s question means and respond to it within a couple of seconds.