When I was teaching Middle School Science I always tried to encourage academic discussion among my students. As a group we would debate results from various experiments, attempt to understand current events in science and talk about how science was all around us. Like many other teachers on my team (or other teachers anywhere really) promoting true collaboration and sharing in the classroom is a wonderful goal to have but ultimately difficult to achieve.
As is true with adults as well as students, loud voices can sometimes drown out the shy or withdrawn. Or if I want to contribute but I’m not sure how my peers will react I may hold back in sharing and let others take the lead. As a teacher, how do I know I am asking the best questions that will get me the responses that will help me understand where students are in their learning and how my teaching needs to respond. These issues with collaboration and questions have been happening since people started talking to solve problems.
Promoting true collaboration in problem solving and having open classroom discussions doesn’t just teach students how to listen to their peers, formulate responses and see all sides of an argument. It can also help them learn better and learn more. According to Hattie, Classroom Discussion has an Effect Size of 0.82 or nearly twice what the expected growth for a student should be in a given school year. To put it simply, when classroom discussion is a regular part of the learning process, students tend to learn more.
In the classroom there are several good tools to promote discussion. Apps that allow for message boards or chats. However, if I want to use that discussion to help me drive instruction as the teacher, I might have to gather data from lots of places, figure out a way to analyze it and then how to best use it. And what if I find that I need some help? Where do I go from there?
Enter Verso Learning.
Verso Learning is a freemium platform that, at its core, provides teachers with the evidence of classroom learning they need to teach better. It starts by giving me really simple strategies and structures that i can build into my lesson to increase student engagement and activate their thinking. Verso creates a space for students to interact, ask questions, upvote helpful information and share, all anonymously. Students must first contribute their own ideas before they can see other student’s responses. Students don’t know who asked a question or who responded to one. They also get tips on how to better contribute and collaborate, helping them see how what they say matters and how to make it matter more. It’s like PD for Kids. Behind the scenes teachers can see everything. They know who is in the discussion, what was said and when and can even analyze their vocabulary usage by grade level and subject area. They also have tools available to moderate any undesirable content.
The Teacher Toolkit section gives me access to a classroom structures and teaching strategies like creating good sentence stems and engagement prompts, helping students become better at metacognition and more. These are like mini online courses you can work through to get new ideas and ways to better engage your students. They are all based on evidence and research and are high leverage things to do in class. You also get access to a number of activities from their curated, deep learning content library to use and adapt for your class. The content library contains over 500 teacher created and classroom tested, high-impact classroom activities searchable by grade level and curriculum area with more being added all the time, so you should be able to find some that are relevant to you.
You get all that for free!
A yearly subscription gets you unrestricted access to the entire toolkit of teacher support cards with over 70 different classroom structures and easy-to-implement strategies to help get students engaged in their learning. The cards are grouped into eight high-effect size teaching strategies that drive student learning such as teacher clarity, feedback, meta-cognition and more. Beyond the embedded PD you get access to unique classroom analytics which, when combined with teacher self-reflection data, enables Verso to suggest areas from the PD cards to focus on. In addition, the upgrade offers you unrestricted access to the high-impact content library and several other features including their individual student vocabulary analysis tool.
At $60.00US for an individual teacher for a year it’s a bargain! My suggestion would be to start using one of their high-impact structures in class, experience the impact it has on your students learning and get a sense of all that’s there and what’s possible. The upgrade happens through the app, it’s really simple. Start with one class and run a few of the free content activities so you can get a handle on how it will work in your class and see how positively the students respond and then start building your own high-impact lesson content from there.
Check out Verso Learning today!
As is true with adults as well as students, loud voices can sometimes drown out the shy or withdrawn. Or if I want to contribute but I’m not sure how my peers will react I may hold back in sharing and let others take the lead. As a teacher, how do I know I am asking the best questions that will get me the responses that will help me understand where students are in their learning and how my teaching needs to respond. These issues with collaboration and questions have been happening since people started talking to solve problems.
Promoting true collaboration in problem solving and having open classroom discussions doesn’t just teach students how to listen to their peers, formulate responses and see all sides of an argument. It can also help them learn better and learn more. According to Hattie, Classroom Discussion has an Effect Size of 0.82 or nearly twice what the expected growth for a student should be in a given school year. To put it simply, when classroom discussion is a regular part of the learning process, students tend to learn more.
In the classroom there are several good tools to promote discussion. Apps that allow for message boards or chats. However, if I want to use that discussion to help me drive instruction as the teacher, I might have to gather data from lots of places, figure out a way to analyze it and then how to best use it. And what if I find that I need some help? Where do I go from there?
Enter Verso Learning.
Verso Learning is a freemium platform that, at its core, provides teachers with the evidence of classroom learning they need to teach better. It starts by giving me really simple strategies and structures that i can build into my lesson to increase student engagement and activate their thinking. Verso creates a space for students to interact, ask questions, upvote helpful information and share, all anonymously. Students must first contribute their own ideas before they can see other student’s responses. Students don’t know who asked a question or who responded to one. They also get tips on how to better contribute and collaborate, helping them see how what they say matters and how to make it matter more. It’s like PD for Kids. Behind the scenes teachers can see everything. They know who is in the discussion, what was said and when and can even analyze their vocabulary usage by grade level and subject area. They also have tools available to moderate any undesirable content.
The Teacher Toolkit section gives me access to a classroom structures and teaching strategies like creating good sentence stems and engagement prompts, helping students become better at metacognition and more. These are like mini online courses you can work through to get new ideas and ways to better engage your students. They are all based on evidence and research and are high leverage things to do in class. You also get access to a number of activities from their curated, deep learning content library to use and adapt for your class. The content library contains over 500 teacher created and classroom tested, high-impact classroom activities searchable by grade level and curriculum area with more being added all the time, so you should be able to find some that are relevant to you.
You get all that for free!
A yearly subscription gets you unrestricted access to the entire toolkit of teacher support cards with over 70 different classroom structures and easy-to-implement strategies to help get students engaged in their learning. The cards are grouped into eight high-effect size teaching strategies that drive student learning such as teacher clarity, feedback, meta-cognition and more. Beyond the embedded PD you get access to unique classroom analytics which, when combined with teacher self-reflection data, enables Verso to suggest areas from the PD cards to focus on. In addition, the upgrade offers you unrestricted access to the high-impact content library and several other features including their individual student vocabulary analysis tool.
At $60.00US for an individual teacher for a year it’s a bargain! My suggestion would be to start using one of their high-impact structures in class, experience the impact it has on your students learning and get a sense of all that’s there and what’s possible. The upgrade happens through the app, it’s really simple. Start with one class and run a few of the free content activities so you can get a handle on how it will work in your class and see how positively the students respond and then start building your own high-impact lesson content from there.
Check out Verso Learning today!