Discussion Prompts

One of the best ways to increase student engagement in the classroom is to use discussion prompts to encourage student collaboration and interactive learning. Discussion prompts are anything that an educator uses to engage the student's senses to create thoughts or questions. Examples of discussion prompts could be: video clips, audio clips, photographs, quotes, statements, graphics, problems, newspaper articles, advertisements or even words. These prompts are usually displayed without comment and after giving students time to think about them, are used for group or class discussion. Let's take a look at the process for using thinking prompts.Like all instructional techniques,…

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Wait for It!

As teachers, we ask a lot of questions, but do we question effectively? Do we often direct questions to the entire group with responses coming from everywhere? Do we solicit answers from all of our students randomly or do we select students we think are likely to know the answers? Are our questions carefully selected to match the standards we are teaching and do our questions lead to deeper thought processes from our students? Most importantly, do we wait, really wait, for students to answer? The way we do questioning as well as how we handle students' answers are an…

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