Conversation Skills & Social Skills for Middle Schoolers & Up – Discussion Grids

Description

Develop social skills, teach conversations skills, and develop discussion skills for middle school & high school students! Use these discussion grids social communication skills in all types of classroom talk. LOTS of bonus ideas and materials included, with prompts, printables, templates, example responses – it’s all here to make your life as easy as possible. Students will be fully engaged, practising conversations skills. Create a safe way into lively discussions where students dig deeper. Get students talking. All the prep is done!

Imagine asking your students to chat to a partner, discuss a particular topic or text, or simply share their thinking. Imagine they turn immediately and use their enthusiastic, animated discussion skills that dig deep into the learning. After a set time, you ask them to return focus to the whole classroom, and they reluctantly wrap up practising their conversation skills with thanks and a developed understanding of their partner(s). Sadly, many teachers have the opposite experiences – times when they have set up an activity that requires discussion skills only to launch it to silence. A lack of conversations skills for teens means they look uncomfortably at each other, stare at their hands or mumble to a stop after only seconds of talking. This resources is one way to start remedying this scenario and develop a classroom culture of engaged discussions and exploratory conversations.

HOW WILL THIS HELP MY STUDENTS?

The social norms for classroom discussions can vary hugely between different cultures and even within different cultural situations. It doesn’t matter if students are from the same place – they all have different levels of confidence and readiness when it comes to talking to others. Support conversation skills for teens by inducting them into your collective style of classroom discussion, and maximise their chances of success and their self-confidence. This resource makes it super-easy to develop discussion skills as it’s guided with teaching notes and is fully editable!

This social skills resource aims to promote successful classroom discussions by providing prompts that can be used to discuss any topic, concept or text.