Look for This in Your Classrooms
Ask any successful athletic coach and they will tell you the key to success is to “Practice like you play”. This mentality makes every action feel natural and increases the likelihood of high performance when it really counts.
The same is true for students’ language use in classrooms. Their practice routines will dictate how they perform on game day (read: testing day). So, let’s get a snapshot related to students’ use of complete sentences in your classrooms
To see if students and teachers are practicing this vital skill, carry out the following task.
What is the percentage of student answers you heard that were in complete sentence form? Is it higher than the percentage of incomplete sentences you heard?
Did the student answers you heard – both the complete and incomplete sentences—sound “academic”, or did they sound more like playground or texting language?
Do your teachers know how critical it is to design and conduct all classroom instruction in a way that requires students to use complete sentences?
Click below for information to help you analyze what you likely discovered from your classroom visits and to see how you can help your teachers to implement this critical instructional behavior.