Episode Summary

We’ve officially hit Episode 9! In this week’s chat, we dive into one of the trickiest parts of classroom life: getting students to actually talk—and not just surface talk. Even when they’re socially chatty, academic conversation doesn’t always follow. Nichole shares how her class often falls silent (“crickets”) when it’s time to turn the talk into thinking. Annie’s class, meanwhile, is full of energy (one day they even broke into song in math!). We unpack all of that and then dig into real-world strategies you can try this week…

A quick heads up - Off Task Teachers are going to be very off task in the month of December! We will be on hiatus, but will be back in early January with more teaching ideas and strategies! If you need your OTT fix, click here to listen to all of our past episodes!

Topics Discussed & Links

Different strategies to promote classroom discussion:

-Think-Pair-Share and “Turn and Talk”

-Talking Chips Kagan Strategy

-Socratic Seminars

-Chalk Talks

Teaching discussion norms explicitly

-Modeling for students

-Setting discussion expectations

-Using sentence starters or specific questions

-Link to Nichole’s Number Talk Discussion Questions and Prompts

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