Talk in the Classroom

On Thursday, September 18th, I went to my first day of field at Reo Elementary School. I am in a third grade classroom comprised of primarily minority (African American and Mexican) children. The prodominant type of talk which I witnessed on this first day was IRE -- Initiation, Response and Evaluation. According to Gibbons in Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning, this type of talk is when a teacher asks what is know as a "display" question (pg. 16) to allow students to demonstrate what they know. An example of this was that my collaborating teacher was doing a lesson on subject and predicates. She first asked the class, "What is a subject?," choose a student to answer, and give the students a response such as "no," "close," or "that's right!" A similar situation occurred during her math lesson when she was teaching about patterns. She would give the first three numbers in the pattern, then chose random students to give the next number in the pattern. Wrong answers were responded to with a "no" and another child would be chosen. In order for response-centered talk to occur in this classroom, the teacher is going to need to make a few changes to her responses. Lea M. McGee describes response-centered talk as discussion which is initiated by comments from the students. For this type of talk to occur, my CT needs to allow students to take charge of their discussions. Instead of giving her opinion or telling the students if a peer's response was correct/incorrect, she needs to ask the students what they think about the answer. If this were to happen, the students could then make their own comments about why they think a response was correct/incorrect and how it needs to be changed. The children will need to be scaffolded by being told that it's okay to give incorrect answers and to help out other students; they must also be taught to build upon other students information. One reason that I may not have seen much of this type of talk was because I did not have the opportunity to witness a book discussion, my CT may use this practice more in other aspects of literacy. A few students in my classroom need to be scaffolded in other ways as well. There seems to be a few students who have a bit of an accent and may be ELLs (I did not have the opportunity to find out for sure yet). One student had a bit of trouble pronouncing the word "predicate" and my CT asked his fellow classmates to help him out. Many of the students seem to need a lot of scaffolding when it comes to math. As the semester goes on, I wil have much more insight as to which students need what types of scaffolding.