Creating Ideas: Humans value the creation and ownership of ideas. Students need lessons and activities in which their original ideas are valued and fostered. In science and math, for example, students can converse to create ideas about their observations, patterns, problem-solving strategies, hypotheses, etc. In history, students can co-analyze primary sources to create novel perspectives on a famous historical figure. Highly effective content learning often comes from tasks that are designed to foster students’ creation and synthesis of ideas.
Clarifying Ideas: Most of the time, what we say to a partner is not understood exactly the way we intended. Each response in a conversation usually tells us if the partner understood what we said or not. If two partners don’t clarify what is being discussed, they don’t have enough shared understanding to build an idea. Clarification is a multi-faceted skill. one has to know when to prompt the partner to clarify, when to clarify one’s own ideas, and how to do so to a wide range of different partners. Clarification also involves both partners figuring out ways to represent the idea, such as analogies and metaphors. This skill involves eleboration, explanation, and paraphrasing, all of which make the current ideas clearer for all involved in the discussion.
Fortifying Ideas: Another skill that is strongly emphasized in the Common Core and other standards is supporting ideas with evidence. In conversations, students should be able to identify and evaluate multiple examples of evidence that fortify ideas. in essence, this is training them to see how knowledge in a discipline is structured and valued. Even when students do understand how to find sufficient evidence, they sometimes lack the vital sub-skill of explaining how the evidence supports the idea. Without this explanation, also called a warrant, students cannot show that they have a solid grasp of the effectiveness of an idea and its support.
Negotiating Ideas: Often, ideas are put to the test and even strengthened with opposing ideas, in which case partners need to negotiate the ideas. Negotiating ideas means proposing a second or third idea that opposes or competes with the first idea. This might mean combining ideas into a new one. It might mean coming to a compromise, agreeing to disagree, or conceding to the new idea. Student should have the academic attitude that all ideas, even if they are contrasting perspectives, are to be explored and even valued by both partners by the end of the conversation.