Like AP, the chalk talk was English 2’s first dialogic task, which previewed our dialogic unit centered around the theme of “Hard-Won Liberty.” The artifacts explored in the chalk talk exposed students to our unit’s four essential concepts: intersectionality, implicit bias, oppression, and social justice. Students completed a chalk talk to make a structured, low-stakes entry into the unit and the concept and practice of dialogism.
Scaffolds Prior
Unlike AP, a schema trained in previous units was the use of Bloom's taxonomical higher-order question stems, a material available during this activity.
Task
To complete the chalk talk, students were placed in groups of four (and in one pairing). Each student began with a sheet of paper, at the center of which was one of the following teacher-selected artifacts:
Students had 20 seconds to read the chalk talk sheet and 2.5 minutes to write a response to the image or question. Students would then pass their sheet clockwise, receiving a sheet with a partner's writing. Students then constructed responses to students' thoughts and questions.
Materials
-
Chalk talk sheets
-
Bloom’s question stems
-
(on smartboard)
-
Timer
-
teacher-generated model
-
Expectations
-
Basic expectation
-
respond to the teacher-generated artifacts with comments and questions
-
-
Priorities
-
generate higher-order questions for peers
-
construct answers to peers' higher-order questions.
-
For the purpose of examining students’ capacity to meet the particular expectations of the chalk talk, I have decided to focus on students “speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing,” “explaining,” and “asking questions.”
-
A student explains the teacher-selected quote from The Handmaid’s Tale: “This is a metaphor for society and how our world works. The maze is the media and trying to get on there [sic] good side cause [sic] if you don’t they ruin everything.”
-
A student asks questions to comprehend the cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: “What do they mean by ‘Citizen an American Lyric’? What topic does it talks [sic] about?”
-
Another student responds with their own speculation about the image: “I’m guessing this is a novel with a picture of a hoodie on the cover and it could be a hoodie of an American citizen and the book could be about that person or group of Americans vocally standing up for something or someone, remenising [sic] on the past tense.”
-
A student asks follow-up questions to complicate speculation: “We are citizens of the U.S. correct? Do we all get treated fairly? Do we all get treated poorly? There’s people out here make [sic] a story [out of] a “citizens” [sic] life.”
-
-
-
A student hypothesizes that “we aren’t free because we still have to follow the laws, and rules in life.”
-
A student challenges this hypothesis by explaining that “laws and rules are made to be better, as long as the public agree [sic], there is nothing to be wrong, and if they cut off every laws [sic] and rules [sic], criminal [sic] and people who does [sic] bad things will starting [sic] to come out."
-
In the chalk talk, there are no physical, bodily communicators to indicate “active listening,” and “thinking about what is heard and giving others time to think” is built into the structure of the chalk talk. Therefore, I have decided to focus on students “being receptive to multiple alternative viewpoints.”
-
A student agrees with another student’s explanation of the teacher-selected quote from The Handmaid’s Tale: “I agree because in addition it [sic] like society but hard to get out of like a ‘maze.’”
-
A student qualifies another student’s explanation of “laws and rules”: “I agree to a certain extent: yes, some laws and regulations are meant to improve lives, such as the freedoms provided by the Bill of Rights, but some were passed to restrict others, such as Jim Crow laws.”
-
A student agrees with another student’s explanation of “laws and rules” but still asks a question that pushes their shared thinking: “How are we free if there is something that contains us?”
-
A student is not immediately receptive to alternative viewpoints and instead directly challenges another student’s idea that “there will always be people born to know hate”: “People get influenced by what they see or hear. Because of their own beliefs they may think others[’] differences are wrong."
Significance to Future Practice
Affordances
-
As with AP’s chalk talk, the written silent discussion nature of the chalk talk allows all students to contribute to four different dialogues; if students’ introduction to dialogic interaction were verbal, even in small groups, there is less guarantee that every student would contribute, compared to the structure of the chalk talk.
-
The chalk talk subtracts the social nuances involved in utilizing dialogic talk as a learning tool (e.g. monitoring time taken to speak; ensuring that all peers have a chance to speak; avoiding accidentally talking over one another etc.) English 2’s chalk talks are just as full and thoughtful as AP’s chalk talks––yet AP is relatively more verbally participatory than English 2: students in English 2 have expressed being too shy, stressed, or anxious to share ideas verbally in class. The likeness in success between English 2 and AP’s chalk talks exhibits that the subtraction of social nuances allows for more accessible entryways into dialogue.
Challenges
-
As theorized in my analysis of AP’s chalk talk, the structure of the chalk talk for any class is wholly dependent on students’ intrinsic motivation to participate. Out of four chalk talks, one chalk talk struggled because one member in their group of three did not participate. (At the time of the chalk talks, the student in particular often declined to participate in classwork of any kind.) Subsequently, a pair of students was left to have silent dialogue around four different artifacts, which required additional structure and monitoring from me as a teacher. Whole groups are susceptible to the participation of one student.
-
Although most groups did not struggle to utilize the full time to contribute to dialogues, across the chalk talks, there are large variations in each chalk talk’s collaborative nature. A full page of written text to which all students contributed does not necessarily indicate interaction among students (see sample 1 of 4). At worst, the chalk talk sheet functions as a shared space to express isolated ideas. The teacher must then monitor chalk talks by reading students’ writing as it is written––a daunting task when there are four chalk talks happening simultaneously.
Effects on Following Artifacts
Like AP, English 2 struggled to exhibit collaborative dialogue and higher-order question asking (even though they had question stems available, which they had used in previous units). Subsequently, again like with AP, I prioritized higher-order question asking as the next facet of dialogism on which to focus in the following week’s literature circles.
Contributions to Inquiry
I admittedly was anxious about implementing a unit with English 2 that was designed to introduce and scaffold a dialogic classroom community. Up until this relatively late point in the school year, students in English 2 resisted participating in dialogic activities as seemingly low-pressure as turn-and-talks.
Students' resistance to dialogic tasks prior to this unit focused on dialogism is perhaps a result of their traditionally monologically organized instruction (in their other classes this year and in other classes in the past). Because in a monlogically organized classroom "knowledge is a given," dialogue for the supposed purpose of finding knowledge seems like a waiting game for when the teacher will inevitably provide "correct" information (Nystrand, et al., 1997, p. 19). However, in a dialogically organized classroom, "knowledge emerges from interaction of voices"––an epistemological shift that would contrast ostensibly most or all of students' education up to this point (p. 19).
The chalk talk helped to reveal that with a deliberate and thorough revisitation of dialogue as a focused and necessary skill in the classroom, students can make a scaffolded and smooth shift from teacher-driven monologism to student-driven dialogism––if given the structured dialogic entryways allowed by an activity like chalk talks.