Planning ahead for success

Middle School Civil Discourse

BETTY NORDENGREN

Plan ahead to create successful middle school lessons

Strategic Lesson Planning

Careful planning and preparation will help your healthy discourse lessons to be successful.

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Start by teaching the meaning of empathy and working with students to develop class norms; refer to norms routinely.

Give students tools such as sentence stems and organizational groupings to empower students who may need extra help participating.

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Multilingual students will benefit, and quieter students will appreciate the help.

Pick the right strategy and give feedback to maximize growth.

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Strategy ideas

• Structured academic controversy
• Problem-based design challenge
• Claim, evidence, reasoning

Make healthy discussion lessons a routine in any class. Try to do them weekly or biweekly. Mix up the format to keep it fresh, but always use class norms and sentence stems to provide a healthy structure to any lesson.

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What Does a Successful Lesson Look Like?

• Students research to prepare for the discussion.
• Students respectfully restate others’ views to build and find common ground.
• Students listen to understand, not to argue their next speaking point.
• Students question, engage, and include their peers.
• The tone is always respectful, never derogatory.
• Students consider their own viewpoints before, during, and after and reflect on changes in perspective or increased awareness.
• Students receive feedback from teachers and their peers on performance to foster growth in discourse skills.

BEFORE TEACHING HEALTHY DISCOURSE LESSONS, TEACHERS SHOULD CONSIDER POSSIBLE QUESTIONS THAT MAY BE ASKED BY PARENTS, SUCH AS:

1. How is this topic relevant?

2. Why are we having these discussions?

3. What structures are in place to keep the discussion healthy?

Some Parents Might Worry . . .

• Some parents worry that their kids are being brainwashed to believe one specific viewpoint through class discussion.
• If a parent is concerned, it is important to communicate that the purpose of the discussion is not to convert students to a specific viewpoint but rather to give them the opportunity to grow their listening and speaking skills and help them learn more about the reasons why people think the way they do.
• Communicating with parents beforehand to explain the purpose of the discussion and safety structures in place can be helpful.

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Perspectives

How Do I Handle . . . ?

A monopolizing student

• Refer the student back to the classroom norms.
• Use timed speaking limits.
• Use guided student reflections on speaking behavior to help students develop awareness.

Mayhem (there won’t be)

• Stop the discussion and refer back to classroom norms.
• Ask students to reflect in writing on their ideas about what happened and think-pair-share with a partner to help understand and discuss, and then process as a group.

A tragedy in the news

• This is not the time to debate the issue. Discussions should be focused on topics that are not raw and painful to anyone in the room. This is time for a discussion about feelings and reactions, not debates.

Middle School Lesson Resources

Prepare

• Before this lesson, a class period should have been dedicated to a class discussion on what group talk norms should be.
• The class should have created their own poster on talk norms, and it should have been posted on the walls. The norms poster can also be used to offer suggestions for group discussion behavior, and it can be posted in the classroom for students to refer to during group discussions as well.

Topic and Context

• This lesson can be taught in many middle-grade classes, including social studies, language arts, science, technology, engineering, math, and so on. It will be taught multiple times throughout the year to help students practice healthy discourse skills. However, the topic will change each time, but the routines, class norms, talk stems, and big idea of the lesson will remain the same.
• As a topic for discussion, the teacher should preselect appropriate content from the website All Sides.
• Choose topics that are appropriate for the students and the content you are teaching.

Objective and Accessibility

Objective

• Students will learn how to productively consider and discuss different sides of a topic with support using class norms, talk stems, and information from the website All Sides.
• The class will practice active listening and healthy discourse skills to connect, challenge, support, and encourage their peers during productive group discussions.

Accessibility

• Closed captions are available on the Both Sides videos to help students understand the video content.
• Multilingual learners can be paired with students of higher English proficiency to model and encourage them to participate in discussion.
• Talk stems and norms posters will be visible to students throughout the discussion to support and guide student participation.

Talk More in Class

Vocabulary and Rubric

Vocabulary

• If there are vocabulary words in the Both Sides lesson that need preteaching, present them now (introduce no more than four to six new words).

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Rubric

• Pass out two copies of the rubric to show students how they will self- assess at the end of the activity and how they will assess their partner at the end of the discussion.

Guided Practice

• The class should watch both videos from the Both Sides website on the topic you have chosen. Allow students to take notes while watching the videos on points they may want to discuss. They should take notes on both perspectives.
• After the videos, you should instruct the students to discuss the video topics in small groups, reminding them to follow the group norms and to use the talk stems for sentence starters. (Group sizes are at the teacher’s discretion.) You should circulate the room to facilitate student discussions and to ensure that group norms are being followed. This is not a competition but a chance to understand different points of view.
• At the end of this time period, you should ask students to fill out one copy of the rubric to self-assess their own performance in the discussion and to fill out one copy of the rubric to evaluate their partner. You should collect both copies and note them before passing them back to the students at a later time.

Lesson Closure

Summary: As a class, review the Big Idea of the lesson. We may think differently, but we can all:

• State our ideas with evidence
• Respect others’ viewpoints
• Challenge and encourage one another

As a class, students should discuss what they think they personally did well during the discussion and what they see as an area to keep practicing. Review key points from the video discussed and ask if anyone’s viewpoint changed as a result of the discussion.

Extensions

This lesson can be extended by having students further explore the topics by:

• Writing persuasive essays
• Creating presentations
• Researching topics discussed
• Formulating student surveys and using the resulting data to visualize student responses