1.01 · Welcome and Session 1 Overview
Greetings, K-2 Educators!
Welcome to the SERP Professional Learning Course on Developing Student Discourse!
The goal of the course, created in collaboration with the District of Columbia Public Schools, is to deepen teachers’ knowledge of the benefits of academic discourse, develop the skills and teacher moves to engage students routinely in this kind of discourse, and to anticipate and develop strategies to overcome common obstacles.
The course will have eight sessions, each approximately an hour in length. Throughout the course, you will have the opportunity to observe discourse strategies and practices in video-recorded classrooms, and to try out these practices in your own classroom.
There are numerous research-based strategies for supporting discussion about texts, such as Junior Great Books, Questioning the Author, Book Club, Literature Circles, etc. This course is compatible with all of these approaches, but does not explicitly feature any of them. Rather, the sessions focus on widely applicable discourse strategies and practices.
Estimated time to complete: 45 min - 1 hour
For each session, we provide a notecatcher. This document includes all of the questions and prompts that you will engage with throughout the session.
You will be prompted to submit all of your responses in the activity text box. But you may copy and paste your answers into the notecatcher to have a record of your responses and take notes.