Student Led Discussion Prompts - FREEBIE!

One part of our literacy program, ReadyGen, is called "Team Talk."  During this part of the morning, students respond to an opinion based question with text based evidence.  Since all of the students have copies of the texts, this has been a really productive portion of our morning.  I post the question on my SMARTboard and give teams a few minutes to discuss before we launch into our whole class discussion.

My school, like many others, has a focus on student led learning.  I much prefer to sit back and observe during these whole class conversation. I usually wait until much later in the year to relinquish responsibility to the students, because I believe that the teacher has the responsibility to challenge students with higher order thinking questions, but part of our evaluation refers to student led lessons.  To help my students along, I created these prompts to help my "Student Moderators."

I haven't used these yet, but I wanted to offer them up to anyone who wants to try them out.  I'm certain all teachers will be able to use them for their whole class text based discussions.  There is one editable frame for you to add in your routine for getting the attention of the class.  We are a Whole Brain Teaching classroom, so I use the "Class?"  "Yes?"  routine.  I tried embedding the font into the file, so please let me know if the font doesn't show up correctly.  (It's KG Second Chances Solid by Kimberly Geswein, if you want to download it.  And I did pay for the license...just in case you are curious!)

My routine for getting the attention of the class

Grab your set of discussion prompts HERE.  Let me know what you think!