Quality Talk About Text (Discussion Practices for Talking and Thinking About Text)

Teachers know quality talk helps develop students’ intelligence. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough support in showing teachers how to plan for this kind of talk. In this book, authors Ian Wilkinson and Kristin Bourdage bring together research-proven approaches to talk about text and offer teachers different models based on the specific skills they want to develop in students.  More than just one approach, theirs is a versatile collection of approaches that will develop and expand students’ knowledge and skills.

Ian and Kristin provide a menu of approaches to discussion about texts based on different purposes:

• talk about text to emphasize personal response
• talk about text to emphasize knowledge building
• talk about text to emphasize argumentation.

Organized in a way that allows teachers to dip in and out of the chapters as needed, you’ll be able to decide which discussion approaches are most closely aligned with the needs of the moment.

With a talk assessment tool, text examples to use with each discussion approach, and links to classroom videos that give you realistic models of what this can look like across a range of grades, you’ll have all the resources you need to discover the joys of quality talk about text.