272. Assessing Discourse

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In this solo episode, host Lindsay explores the importance of assessing student-led discourse in the classroom. Often, assessment is discussed in terms of grading or projects, but discourse is also something that can — and should — be assessed as well. 

While it may be easier to evaluate written work, Lindsay emphasizes why it’s also important to assess verbal communication skills. In this episode, we talk about practical strategies for collecting data on discourse, what to assess, and how to utilize self and peer reflections for continuous improvement.

Why? 
Integrating discourse assessment into your classroom planning can help foster deeper engagement and understanding among students. Educators often rely on assessing writing only, but assessing discourse helps achieve a more comprehensive picture of student capabilities and encourages students to reflect on their communication skills and participation patterns.
What? 

Assessing discourse involves several key steps:

Step 1: Collect data. The first step is to get a transcript of a class or group discussion. This can be done by leveraging AI software, recording the conversation on video or audio, or enlisting co-teachers, coaches, or visitors to take a transcript for you.  

Step 2: Identify what you want to assess in a conversation. There are critical “talk behaviors” (taken from Maria Nichols’ book, Building Bigger Ideas) like asking questions, synthesizing information, and inviting new ideas that are useful to understand, evaluate, and analyze when reviewing the transcript. 

Step 3: Pay attention to the group dynamics. You can analyze individual and collective participation patterns to understand dynamics and engagement levels, using methods like spider webbing for visual representation (e.g., draw lines between students who are talking, evaluating if it’s going back and forth between a few or if most students are speaking). 

Step 4: Encourage individual reflections post-discussion. Have students individually assess and provide feedback on their discourse skills and the group's overall performance. You can give them a rubric or ask them to write a note on their strengths and areas for growth. 

Step 5: Engage in group discussions to evaluate the group’s discourse skills. Go back to your class agreements and see if they were upheld, or if the agreement needs to be edited and changed based on how the discourse went. 

Final Tip

To deepen your student discourse practices, start by encouraging students to face each other during discourse instead of you. Respond to their questions by prompting them with questions that guide further thinking rather than supplying direct answers.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Skill-Based Rubric Templates with you for free, as well as Gabe Weaver’s transcript analysis practice. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 272 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:​

TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: Welcome back to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 272, and today we're talking about assessing discourse. Woo. Such a good topic Often we talk about assessments, and often we think about, like, w- the types of, like, grading of essays and, like, all the things. I mean, I was a former high school literacy teacher, so I mean, there's a lot of written work that we think of.
But we can, and I would argue should, be assessing discourse as well, whether that is verbal, whether that is ASL, like, whatever the communication, um, is, it, style is, that is going to be really critical to assess something that is not in writing, right? So here are some of the challenges. Yes, it is easier to assess students' written work sometimes for a variety of reasons, often because of the things that we are looking for and trying to assess, but also because, uh, often it is hard when you are focused on facilitating and teaching, and often discourse is mediated by the teacher, and we don't have as much student-led conversation.
When you're trying to do all of that, it is very challenging to pay attention to what the students are saying and do any sort of, of, of grading or assessment. Okay, so here are the kind of categories of things we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about how you actually collect the data so that you don't have to do everything in the moment, though you can, but there are ways to kind of collect the data to return to it later, both for your evaluative purposes or assessment purposes and feedback purposes, but also for students to reflect on their own participation, both individually and as a class.
We'll also talk about what you can assess, so what are you actually trying to pay attention to and notice and give feedback on. That's gonna be kind of the bulk of the episode, I think. And then we're gonna talk about leveraging self and peer reflection, as I mentioned, and we'll end with a few tips and a freebie.
Okay, let's start with collecting the data. One option, and this is a great one if you can, take a transcript. Certainly, you can use some, like, AI-based services to transcribe audio for you. I mean, Loom does it. If you have a certain package, Zoom does it. I wanna say Google Meets might even do it. Um, so you certainly can take an audio recording and then transcribe it using a specific service.
But I also think that it is something that you can have, um, like a rough transcript. Like, your role, if you set it up so that the students are truly leading the discussion and you're just kinda t- typing, like, you can do that. The best way, if you have this as an opportunity, the best way I suggest is actually to use either co-teachers if you have them, coaches, instructional coaches, or other people who are kind of visiting your class.
Um, say, "Oh, you wanna visit my class? Great. Visit my class, and I need you to do something for me," right? "Can you take a transcript of this whole class discussion?" Or, "We're having small group discussions. Can you please sit in with this group and take a transcript of this group?" Right? Um, you can also rotate if you're doing constant small group discussions, you can take a transcript.
Let's say you do one every day. You can take a transcript. Let's say there's five groups of one group on Monday, one group on Tuesday, so on, so on You can also have, and I've done this before, when there are small groups, have groups set up a recording. Like a com- you'll give them a computer, an iPad or something, and just say, "Okay, well, you're gonna like, you know, record yourselves on video or audio," whatever the parameters for your permissions are at the school.
But that way you can also just get a sense of like, okay, everyone's recording and I'm gonna be able to listen to it even though there's five conversations happening at the same time. Um, okay, another thing ... Nope, I already said that. Okay, great. So let's talk about what you can assess during a student-led conversation.
So I just read Maria Nichols' book from 2019, Building Bigger Ideas. It is great. It is excellent. I think it is written for elementary, but it is totally valuable for all grades, and I'm gonna share kind of a slightly adapted version with some added thoughts of my own, um, from her list of what she considers when she is assessing discourse.
Okay, number one, the use of or range of, is the language she used, range of talk behaviors and, and if they're purposeful. So talk behaviors in my mind are things like q- q- asking questions, clarifying questions, or like prompting discussions. So we have a Socratic seminar and there's, yes, a key question, but I'm gonna add my own question.
I want to see how my peers respond. Could be synthesizing. So here are the points of agreement that I'm noticing in our class. Uh, here are ... is the one place that we disagree, right? We disagree on this particular thing. Can we go down this path? Um, i- identifying points of confusion. Like, okay, so we're, we're kind of talking about this in two different ways.
It's not necessarily disagreement, but we seem confused. Can we go there? Uh, building on others' ideas is definitely a talk behavior that is purposeful. We wanna grow our ideas, and we don't want to just use the frame, the sentence frame. I'd like to add on to so and so because blah, blah, blah, right? But we actually want to deepen the ideas, complicate the ideas, stretch the ideas.
Um, so building on i- in a purposeful way. We might also use a talk behavior like inviting new ideas or people into the conversation if they have been quiet. We might just invite to anyone. Maybe it's not a specific person, but we might say to the group, "Is there anyone who thinks differently about this?"
Like, let's get a different idea in here. Those are all great talk moves that we can link to purpose. Okay. The other thing Maria Nichols talks about is individual and collective patterns of participation. So yes, this might be something like how much one person talks. Um, spider webbing is a good, like a mapping for that.
So you would literally, let's say you're all in a circle, you would draw kind of a circle on the page, l- label where everyone is sitting, and then you would draw a line from one person to the next person who talks to the next person who talks. What this does is it illuminates kind of the pattern of who talks after whom.
Is there a particular dynamic where people are talking back and forth and the rest of the class is kind of silent? Overall, how many lines does a kid have, you know, at the end of the discussion versus like, oh, that student never got a line, they never once spoke, right? It, it kind of illuminates things like that.
Um, so frequency, pattern of talk, and also kind of like order of who usually goes first. Um, also other things to think about when we think about individual and collective patterns of participation, this may not be what Maria Nichols was thinking, but I think about body language and facial expressions and kind of how the group may...
Not using verbal language necessarily, but how they demonstrate their engagement, lack of engagement, other emotions and thoughts that come up, um, in various ways. So that might be something you notice She also talks about strengths of the community regarding discourse. So I would think of the co-created discourse agreements that hopefully you came up with as a class prior to having the conversation.
So how well do we adhere to these things? And I think that's a really important thing, I'll get to this later, but to note and, and have the class think about as a group after the conversation as well. But that is something you can note while the conversation is happening. Strengths of meaning-making she's talking about.
I, I think this is really, like, deepening the thinking here. So are we deepening the thinking? Are we just kind of abandoning ideas? I have had the great fortune to collaborate and coach an amazing ELA teacher. His name is Gabe Weaver, and he has used reflective prompts surrounding transcripts, I'll mention one in a moment, but any sort of, like, student-led discourse.
And he has in- invited students to look at a transcript and think about where could we ... where do we kind of, like, abandon idea, an idea and where could we actually tap back into that and take that into a new place or to go deeper? Like, let's reevaluate. If we could have this conversation again, where do we miss an opportunity to deepen the thinking?
Which I think is a really great reflective prompt for students. Um, the other thing Maria Nichols thinks about is how much facilitation is needed. So was this truly student-led or was it, was the teacher just kind of, like, in between each student voice? Is she really or he really or are they really directing the conversation or are they, are they good to go, right?
Are they talking to one another, looking at one another? Okay. Other things. And this might be ... This is how I initially started. This might be kind of your go-to right now, but I do think there's value in this, so continue to practice. Key ideas or quotes from the discussion are great things to notice. Also, this gives you an opportunity to kind of synthesize at the end if you wanna give a synthesis just in case your students don't.
Ideally, it's student-led, the synthesizing. But if you're gonna do it at first and then turn it over to them later, it's great, great to model. We know this about discourse. Actually, the research bears this out, that modeling even for, like, a week's worth of discussions, like model six or seven times even, when you turn it over to students, they are doing things so, so, so markedly better.
Really helpful to model. Anyways, you can identify things that are important to hold onto, so those key ideas, but you could also say, "Hey, this is questionably factual. We're gonna do a fact-checkers class tomorrow, or at least, like, 10 minutes of a class. We're each gonna investigate one of these claims." If it is a blatant inaccuracy, you can absolutely jump in and correct in the moment.
I know I say teachers don't talk during student-led discourse, but you can absolutely correct blatant inaccuracies if a student does not. Um, but ones that are like, "Hmm, I'm not sure about this," or, or, "As a class it would be beneficial for us to investigate," hang on to those and repeat those later Okay, other things you can think about or notice or reflect on, subject-specific skill-based standards.
So for social studies, this is often claim, evidence, reasoning. For science or math, it might be analyzing a graph of data. Like if they're using a visual support and analyzing that or pulling in information from diverse sources, all of that is really great, and those are skill-based standards that are maybe specific to your subject area.
You can totally look for those. Um, we also can assess, like, how students seem to be understanding the content. We can also, thinking about our last episode from last week on the WIDA framework, we could think about for multilingual learners or any students really, the language use. So, you know, thinking again about the key language use.
So are we doing like an argument? Okay, well then what are the language expectations, functions, and features of argumentative language, right? And we can think about that six-point rubric that WIDA has to support language building and development. Um, we can also-- I just also wanna name, and I don't think I said this in the WIDA episode, there is a speaking rubric for grades one through 12 that has kind of general indicators for the discourse level, so like the linguistic complexity of the student, um, sentence level, so those are like the language forms, and the word or phrase level, which would be like their vocabulary usage.
So that is really helpful. And they also have a really good chart on page 20 of the framework, so again, go back to that episode to get the link, of asking teachers after you have listened to students have discourse, what can students do? What are your next teaching and learning moves? And then what are strategies to support and scaffold learning?
So I mean, I think any teacher can do that for any student, but I think that's a really helpful, um, piece to just know exists. Okay, and then I have mentioned this a lot already, but leveraging self and peer reflection is really critical here, particularly because I think about the ways that we interact with our peers, with-- and students interact with their peers in non-classroom environments that are really, truly student-led or youth-led because they are not in a class environment at all.
They're just like w- w- we want to be able to facilitate students to have good conversations with their peers and with other people beyond the classroom. And so it is really important that students feel they have the capacity and language to share what went well, what didn't go well, how to have these conversations, but also reflect on them.
So what does that look like in a class setting? For an exit ticket post discussion, I like an individual reflection. So have students kind of assess their discourse skills. You can give them a rubric if you have one. Have them note specific strengths and areas for growth. I like to have them give examples.
Like if you tell me you're really good at using evidence, well how did you do that today? If you tell me that you're really good at synthesizing, write me a synthesis. If you didn't do it verbally at least, like t-- show me that you can do that skill. I also really like the question, uh, harkening back to Maria Nichols' idea of deepening thinking, James Nottingham writes about growing the thinking, how did your thinking change?
Because if it didn't, we need to do something differently, right? Um, but also how did it feel experientially? Like did you feel like you were a equitable participant in the conversation? Did you feel that the class valued what you had to say? Did it feel good to listen and seek to understand, right? Like how did it viscerally feel in your body?
We can also have each individual, and collectively we can talk as a group or in a small group about the class as a whole or whatever the group size was for your discourse, and you could assess the group's discourse skills. Again, same thing, note strengths, note areas for growth, give examples, but also do an agreement check-in.
So we have these agreements, did we follow them? Did we, you know, find that there was a moment where we actually needed to either adhere to something better or do we need to revise or introduce a new discourse agreement that is not currently in our list, but this specific interaction highlighted the need to add or edit?
That's also very possible, right? The agreement should really evolve and grow with the class and with the experiences we have together Again, I mentioned Gabe Weaver's awesome transcript analysis practice. I'm actually gonna link, he said that was okay to share with teachers. It's so great. He has so many of these, but I'm gonna link one example of his transcript analysis.
And in that, he actually says, you know, uh, it was him doing this. You can also have students. Ultimately, we want students to be doing this. But where there is an interjection from the teacher or a student move that is great, you want to highlight for them th- that happened in a transcript and invite them, "Okay, check out the highlighted sections.
Pick a highlighted section and tell me what was this person doing and why did they do it?" So basically, again, thinking about Marie Nichols identifying the range of talk moves and their connection to a purpose. What was this doing? What was the talk move? And why did they do it? What was the purpose? How did this grow the thinking?
How did this, you know, whatever the, the goal was. I think it would be incredibly powerful to have a transcript, share it with students, and invite reflection. And this is one question you can ask them in reflection. You could ask them many more. Gabe certainly has experimented with asking different ones throughout the years of him doing this.
But I think the goal is students are not just done with the conversation, they're looking back on the conversation, and they are reflecting on, like, how to grow it next time and how it could be better. Okay, some final tips. I mentioned some of these kind of throughout the episode, but just wanna wrap up with when you are having student-led discourse, they often will look at you if this is new to them.
Even if you are sitting behind students, which I recommend, let them sit and look at each other. Encourage them to face each other and not turn and look at you and talk to you. They're talking to each other. That is a big shift. It will happen over time, but do what you can to facilitate that. And if students actually, like, pull you into the conversation, if they ask you questions, often this happens, I find, in a small group setting, so like a, you know, a table talk, like a five, four or five students.
Th- and you just kind of go to, uh, to listen in or pay attention to what they're doing W- what you can do in response is to pose a question in return. So, "What do you think?" is, like, my favorite. That's a super easy one to just have in your back pocket, right? "Oh, you know, Miss whatever, whatever, what do you think?"
Right? Usually works in most situations. Or you might, if they're really stuck on something, you might cue them because you know they have a particular resource that could help them. Be like, "Oh, that makes me think of your whatever worksheet," or, "That makes me think of this poster on the wall." Whatever it is.
You can do a light cue or just pose a question in return. Like, you don't have to completely ignore them, but I wouldn't engage and try to, like, jump in and help if, if unnecessary. Let them try to grapple with it. And they're in a group. Like, they can lean on each other. If the question doesn't work for the kid asking it, maybe one of the other kids will, will pick up.
Okay, that is it for this episode. You can grab all of this information, the various links that I talked about, and the freebie for this episode, which is a skill-based rubric template for assessments, in our blog post, which is located at www.lindseybethlyons.com/blog/272