Discussion Text Pdf
Denisha Padley
Find articles, expert Q&A, video, research and reports, and additional resources that provide research-based information for educators, families, and others who want to help young people become better readers and writers.
Teachers should provide opportunities for students to engage in high-quality discussions of the meaning and interpretation of texts in various content areas as one important way to improve their reading comprehension.
In effective discussions students have the opportunity to have sustained exchanges with the teacher or other students, present and defend individual interpretations and points of view, use text content, background knowledge, and reasoning to support interpretations and conclusions, and listen to the points of view and reasoned arguments of others participating in the discussion.
In classes where a choice of reading selections is possible, look for selections that are engaging for students and describe situations or content that can stimulate and have multiple interpretations. In content-area classes that depend on a textbook, teachers can identify in advance the issues or content that might be difficult or misunderstood or sections that might be ambiguous or subject to multiple interpretations. Alternatively, brief selections from the Internet or other sources that contain similar content but positions that allow for critical analysis or controversy can also be used as a stimulus for extended discussions.
Further, the types of discussion questions appropriate for history texts would probably be different from those for science texts, as would those for social studies texts or novels. Because part of the goal of discussion-based approaches is to model for students the ways that good readers construct meaning from texts, it seems reasonable to suggest that discussions of history texts might be framed differently from those of science texts.
If the reading comprehension standards that students are expected to meet involve making inferences or connections across different parts of a text or using background knowledge and experience to evaluate conclusions, students should routinely have the opportunity to discuss answers to these types of questions in all their reading and content-area classes.
For example, assign students to read selections together and practice using the comprehension strategies that have been taught and demonstrated. In these groups students can take turns playing various roles, such as leading the discussion, predicting what the section might be about, identifying words that are confusing, and summarizing.
As these roles are completed, other students can then respond with other predictions, other things that are confusing, or different ways of summarizing the main idea. While students are working together, the teacher should actively circulate among the groups to redirect discussions that have gone astray, model thinking strategies, or ask students additional questions to probe the meaning of the text at deeper levels.
In this study teachers were trained to follow five guidelines: ask questions that require students to explain their positions and the reasoning behind them, model reasoning processes by thinking out loud, propose counter arguments or positions, recognize good reasoning when it occurs, and summarize the flow and main ideas of a discussion as it draws to a close. To be effective these types of discussions do not need to reach consensus; they just need to give students the opportunity to think more deeply about the meaning of what they are reading.
Students might not actively participate in text-based discussions for a number of reasons, but these two are the most important. One strategy to deal with the first problem is to create opportunities for discussion by using text that has a very high interest level for students in the class but may only be tangentially related to the topic of the class.
For example, a newspaper article on the problem of teen pregnancy might be integrated in a biology class, one on racial profiling in a social studies class, or one on child labor practices in a history class. Students typically find discussion and interaction rewarding, and once a good pattern is established, it can be generalized to more standard textbook content.
It is also important to establish a non-threatening and supportive environment from the first class meeting. As part of this supportive environment, it is important to model and encourage acceptance of diverse viewpoints and discourage criticism and negative feedback on ideas. Teachers can help students participate by calling on students who may not otherwise contribute, while asking questions they know these students can answer.
Student-led discussions in small groups can be another solution for students who are hesitant to engage in whole-classroom discussions. As mentioned before, the quality of these discussions can be increased, and student participation broadened, if teachers provide an organizing task or activity that students can focus on as discuss the content of a text.
However, if literacy standards require students to think deeply (that is, to make connections, criticize conclusions, and draw inferences), many students will require the opportunity to acquire these skills by being able to observe models of this type of thinking during discussions.
In the absence of adjustments to the curriculum, teachers should carefully identify a few of the most important ideas in their content area for deeper consideration through extended classroom discussion that focuses on building meaning from text.
Leading instructive discussions requires a set of teaching skills that is different from the skills required to present a lecture or question students in a typical recitation format. It is also true that discussions can create challenges for classroom control that may not occur in other instructional formats. Most teachers will need some form of professional development to build their skills as discussion leaders or organizers.
Within schools, it could be very helpful for content-area teachers to experience these kinds of discussions themselves as a way of learning what it feels like to participate in effective, open discussions.
Also, a number of useful books on this topic can be the basis for teacher book study groups. The following resources provide helpful information and strategies related to improving the quality of discussions about the meaning and interpretation of texts:
Adler, M., & Rougle, E. (2005). Building literacy through classroom discussion: Research-based strategies for developing critical readers and thoughtful writers in middle school. New York: Scholastic.
I was just typing a discussion post and while I was finishing the last section, (roughly 35 words) the text appeared red on my screen. I attempted to use the tools to highlight it and change the font color back to black. Instead it only changed one letter and the rest stayed red. I tried two or three times before I decided to just submit the post.
Usually when something like that happens and parts of the text don't display, it is because of some stray/broken formatting codes. Maybe you cut and pasted text and got the opening code but not the closing code, or in the process of editing the text also deleted part of the formatting.
@mzimmerman has a great solution here...and the clear formatting option is one I often forget about. One thing that I often use when I need to clean up HTML code is a HTML cleaner website. I've written a blog posting here in the Community on one such example: HTML Cleanup. You might want to check it out some time. Hope it will be of help to you.
Hi all,
I've been banging my head about this for a few days now and was hoping someone here might be able to help!
I have created a discussion column within a module. The module has about 1200 objects. The discussions column displays the discussions as "indicators for all discussions" i.e. the little speech bubble.
My quesion is this: is it possible to filter down only those objects which have a disucssion (open or closed)? For example if I had only 3 discussions in the whole module, how could I find those 3 without scrolling down through all 1500 objects? Is it possible?
The column filter option only has a "contains" option, which I believe requires some form of text in order to be able to fulfill its filter function.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Cheers!
JN
JuanNil - Thu Aug 04 03:55:22 EDT 2011
kbmurphy - Thu Aug 04 19:53:21 EDT 2011
Ok, my post above doesn't work with the indicator, but it does work for discussion text. Still why use the indicator when you can just put the discussion details itself in the column?
I still say no DXL required for this solution...just follow my steps above.
SystemAdmin - Fri Aug 05 06:13:46 EDT 2011
I do not see any other way of filtering objects with discussions than displaying some column with text or playing around with different DXL solutions, you might show the discussion status with DXL, do a discussion trigger or develop your own filtering dialog to filter discussions, but all of those
need DXL. The scripts in Insert / Column where you insert a Layout DXL showing discussion data are
mostly unencrypted, so even those might be modified.
The basis of this is of course Telelogic's decision to implement discussions not as attributes but something else (whatever?). Thus when you add a discussion, nothing is changed in the module so you can add discussions even in baselines. But as you said, IBM / Telelogic should have implemented some kind of menu item for filtering objects with discussion, similar as exists for suspect links.