Discussion Sentence Frames
Discussion sentence frames risk making your students sound like AI. With the right discussion sentence frames, they can practice skills through language. Let’s look at how to get all you possibly can out of your sentence frames.
Group Discussion Evaluation
The ELA Common Core discussion standard (SL 1) contains a lot of indicators for group discussion evaluation. These can be distilled into four areas.
- Preparation. Beyond doing prior reading, it involves taking notes/marking in such a way that a student can refer to the text during discussion. They must be able to find and quote what they read. It can also go beyond to external research and question writing to augment the discussion.
- Cooperation. These are the meta-tasks that allow the group to function, such as taking on roles, decision-making, and keeping the group on track.
- Interaction. This is probably the most traditional area when thinking of group discussion evaluation–asking and answering questions, but also clarifying and kindly inviting others to interact.
- Attention. This requires sustained focus–not just waiting to share. It involves thoughtful responses, summarizing major points, and acknowledging and shifting when someone shares an insight that changes a student’s thinking.
Sentence Frames Examples
The group discussion evaluation is way more advanced and specific than the basics that serve as defaults. So, how does one promote preparation, cooperation, interaction, and attention? Sentence frames! By cueing students how the skills sound, they can bridge the gap. It also helps me be more specific as their teacher and raise my expectations. Here’s an example for preparation.
I use a checklist to assess what areas students are and are not doing. If I find that there are gaps, I can go for a quick win by cueing an area half the class is using. This ensures that I have some example students but room enough for everyone to improve. Alternately, I can go for an area no one is using and teach it more directly, as well as modeling it myself.
Sentence Frames for Discussion
I created Group Discussion Evaluation and Checklists to keep me mindful of truly teaching discussion. Available as printable AND online resources, this set of Common Core standards-aligned checklists and sentence frames have so many uses for group discussion. Provided in FOUR forms (individual, whole-class, self-evaluation, and peer), the evaluation checklist acts as a formative assessment (minilesson = whatever you didn’t check). The sentence frames support student language development. They can be handed as cards to prompt students or displayed for the class as reminders. These resources organize my instruction for HOW to discuss since I tend to focus on WHAT we’re discussing. Even better, I made them grade-level specific because the expectations spiral!
