Weave Effective, Structured Discussion Opportunities into Any Lesson
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🎯 Key discussion strategies explained in simple, practical language.
🎯 Suitable for primary and secondary.
🎯 Create structured oracy interventions in your classroom today.
🎯 Find the discussion techniques that work for you and best suit your learners.
🎯 Develop speaking and listening in your lessons that builds confidence, improves writing and sustains engagement.
Discussion is one of my favourite types of lesson activity.
I used it a lot when I was teaching and I use it extensively in every training session I deliver.
For me, there’s nothing better as a teacher than the sound of a room full of learners eagerly discussing and debating the topic you’re teaching.
And it’s so easy to leverage discussion to improve learners’ writing as well.
Simply use discussion to precede written work and you have instant scaffolding, with learners able to organise, edit and refine their ideas verbally, before committing them to paper.
Create Engaging Discussion Activities For Every Learner You Teach
Inside The Discussion Toolkit you’ll find over twenty discussion activities you can use with different age groups and when teaching different topics and subjects.
Each provides a different way to structure discussion, helping you to direct learner talk so it is both meaningful and productive.
Some of the activities are simple and familiar, requiring minimal set up.
Others are more complex and involved, but with significant pay-offs as a result.
And, of course, every strategy can be modified and adapted so it fits with your learners and your approach to teaching.
The resource is FREE to download and FREE to use.
It is published by Gershon Learning Limited under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license.
That means you can download it, freely share it and redistribute it with attribution and a link to this site, but you cannot use it for commercial purposes or create any derivatives of it.
Download The Discussion Toolkit Today
Here’s the PDF version for you to download FREE:
What’s Inside?
Here’s a list of some of the activities and techniques waiting for you inside The Discussion Toolkit:
- 💬 Circle Time
- 💬 P4C
- 💬 Rainbow Groups
- 💬 Snowballing
- 💬 Listening Triads
- 💬 Envoys
- 💬 Jigsawing
- 💬 Value Continuum
- 💬 Hot-Seating
- 💬 Goldfish Bowl
- 💬 Radio Phone-In
- 💬 TV Chat Show
Using the Discussion Toolkit in Your Planning
The Discussion Toolkit is non-directive and curriculum agnostic.
You can use the strategies inside any way you like.
Here are five ideas to get you started.
✅ Read through the toolkit and identify the three discussion strategies that most appeal to you. Try these out in your lessons and reflect on their impact.
✅ Try using a discussion strategy you either haven’t used before, or haven’t used in a long time. Use The Discussion Toolkit as inspiration to widen your repertoire and introduce your learners to a different way of doing classroom talk.
✅ Pick one strategy from the toolkit and use it consistently over an eight-week period. The aim here is twofold. First, to create a new habit for yourself, giving you confidence and certainty over how to use the strategy. Second, to train learners in how the activity works. The more familiar they become with it, the easier it will be to use it with them, and to reap the benefits.
✅ Identify one discussion strategy you like the sound of and use this as a precursor to written work. Try planning a lesson in which the writing you want learners to do is scaffolded by the discussion activity that precedes it. In my experience, this leads to strong outcomes.
✅ Start a ‘Rate the Discussion Activity’ chart with your class. Work through a range of discussion strategies from the toolkit and, after using each one, reflect on it with your learners. Together, you should rate each activity and decide which ones you like best.
P.S. You can access all my resources in one place on the free resources hub page.
P.P.S. For dozens more strategies, activities and techniques, be sure to take a look at my FREE Talk, Discussion and Oracy Knowledge Base.
