Mod 9 Discussion: Oral Language Support in My Classroom

Our structured discussions grow out of our small group sessions during which the students are completing their graphic organizers. The categories in the r organizers provide the frame of discussion starters (what you would call sentence starters), but they are developed primarily through group/partner responses; the students have to brainstorm and review concepts from the lesson that we modeled earlier in order to complete the graphic organizers. Thus the discussion is both structured and aligned to the benchmarks we are working to master.