The article “Instructional
conversations: Promoting comprehension through discussion” portrayed a picture
of an active and productive classroom with students learning while thinking and
discussing effectively. When I was reading the article, what related to me the
most is the fact that our TE400 classes are full of these instructional
conversations. Instructional conversations encourages teachers to engage
students in interactions to promote analysis, reflection, and critical thinking
to provide “true education”, which reflects to the article about “real teaching
involves helping students think, reason, comprehend and understand important
ideas”. This has been proved by us that when we were thinking and trying to
answer the teacher’s open-ended questions by relating to the articles we read
or our experiences of teaching, we have been given the opportunities to
interact with each other and learning through inquiry and exploring from
ourselves and the people we were discussing with. It is very important to promote
this in elementary classrooms because that is the crucial stage when the kids
first learn how to communicate with others in an effective discussion and get
something important out of it. Teachers play a very important role in the
instructional conversations because not only do they need to raise the
appropriate open-ended questions, but only they need to make sure the students
have time to think through and prepare for the discussion, and then make sure
to lead the discussion and sum up the discussion appropriately too. Teachers
need to make sure the discussion is proceeding at an appropriate pace and they
also need to pay attention to what the students are discussing and pull out
important ideas while summing up the discussion. IC promotes learning, but
requires a deliberate and self-controlled agenda in the mind of the teacher. In
this case, students can be most productive and learn the most when the
teacher’s leading and taking a good control of the discussion. While reading
the article, it came to my mind that IC could not only be promoted in regular
classrooms, but also could be promoted in ESL classrooms. I remember I had one
of the LLT classes which was talking about the strategies of teaching ESL
students, there’s a strategy called meaning based conversation, which means
when ESL students are learning English through a conversation, the teacher
should convey the meaning of the objects which the students are about to learn
in the target language by discussion and gesture without telling the students what
it is directly. I agree it would make a deeper impression to the students and
while discussing and explaining, the students can learn the target language
more effective and naturally. Of course promoting a strategy like IC is controversial
and its effectiveness could depend on various situations such as the ways that
the teacher leads the discussion, or how preparative the students are. So to implicate
an instructional conversation class needs a lot of planning and controlling,
but I think it is a good way to teach and for the students to learn.
