Good conversations about literature help students reach new insights about the text, themselves, and the world around them.
Good conversations help students become better critical thinkers as they test their understandings and ideas against those of their classmates.
Enabling good conversations provides teachers with a number of ongoing challenges.
Good discussion topics—those that are interesting to the students or ones to which they have personal connections—encourage rich conversations.
Teachers who value good discussions learn to be open to, and supportive of, spontaneous developments in the conversation.
Teachers have to be sensitive when presented with confidential or highly personal revelations from students, relating those issues back to the text in productive ways.
Teachers assume a number of roles during discussion, from taking part as a participant to stepping back as an observer.
Teachers' roles in a discussion change as they help students become more independent in their discussion groups or as specific groups need additional support and direction.
Teachers often play a supportive role in discussion groups by letting students shape the discussion and stepping in only as needed.
During discussion, the focus often shifts from the teacher's to the students' agenda as students focus on the issues that matter most to them.
Teaching specific literary concepts is done most effectively in the context of grappling with a text as a whole.
Envisionment-building teachers learn to be sensitive to identifying "teachable moments" and using them to present specific concepts within the larger context of the ongoing literary discussion.
Teachers in envisionment-building classrooms use both large- and small-group discussions depending on their agenda and the needs of their students at a particular time.
Many teachers use large-group discussions as platforms to teach and model strategies for effective conversation that they expect students to take into their small groups.
Helping students debrief about what went well or what didn't work in group discussions helps them develop strategies that will make them more successful in later discussions.
