Page 202 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 8
Tim Moore, Second-Year Teacher
When I reflect on my first year teaching fifth-grade, what I believe my students enjoyed the most were our classroom debates and discussions. I remember going through teacher preparation classes and participating in all activities, thinking to myself “What does this have to do with how I will teach my own lessons? How can discussion benefit my students and aid them in constructing new knowledge and skills?”
Well, as a first-year teacher I stepped up to that plate and decided that my classroom would be a place where the teacher’s voice was not dominant in classroom discourse; instead, the students would play an active role. I thought a classroom debate would be a great way to get some discussion going in my classroom. During debates, I let the students pick their side and we set some simple ground rules in order to make the debate go smoothly; we even had a stuffed monkey that we tossed from one side to the other and whoever had the monkey was the only person who was allowed to speak. After a lengthy period of time of preparing for the debate and about thirty minutes of set-up time, all
I learned after that first debate was that my students were masters at yelling at one another and that they needed some serious help learn- ing how to communicate their thoughts about social studies.
As a class we began working together to learn about how to debate and have meaning- ful conversation with each other. We worked on the language we should use to disagree with someone and how to interpret or challenge information from the text and how to use it in our debates. As time went on I started to see
HOW CAN I USE DISCOURSE POWERFULLY?
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TEACHER VOICE