Accountable Talk

"Accountable talk" has three main aspects and they are the most important factors that enable students' participation in the academically productive discourse: community, knowledge and reasoning. These three facets of talk are connected and interdependent and must be present in the process of academic learning.
Accountability to the Learning Community - a talk that relates to the ideas of others. Participants have to listen each other and develop ideas together. This facet is easy to implement in a classroom. Teacher uses conversation openers and stimulate students to participate.
Accountability to Standards of Reasoning- this talk is based on logical connections it involves explanation and self-correction.
Accountability to Knowledge is the most difficult of the three as it is based on the facts, and written information accessible to all. The conversation is guided in the direction of the academically correct

This paper has Vygotskian streamline which highlights the benefits of social interaction for development of mental processes. Well designed and synchronized talk and tasks as items of social practices are seen as crucial for academic learning. Here scaffolding plays crucial role in understanding difficult and complex concepts. Discourse-intensive pedagogical practices are giving results that can be supported by evidence.

I would like to focus on the first of them, the accountability to the learning community.

In this talk students, participate together by listening and giving contributions while responding to each other ideas.

This paper elaborates the lack of response and interaction and offers a different approach to the classical classroom setting. The proposal is to build up a talk by motivating the students to participate and develop ideas, or collaborate through careful listening, building conversation over each other's ideas and asking questions aimed on clarifying or expanding the proposition. Here it is very important to open up the conversation by offering interesting and complex problems in order to support the talk. As a result it's claimed that the teachers find easy ways of getting the conversation on, and, over the weeks, the students get to use statements that show assertive and mature reasoning. This appears as a surprise to the teachers, they get impressed by students’ and their interest in the subject.

In this text we can see this principle applied to the middle school students who are failing to follow the school.  Around the concept of an Investigators Club, the students are offered different kind of classroom, where teacher doesn't provide the answers, but acts as a coach, and helps them to explicate, clarify and sharpen their theories. The paper shows that the learning is effectively taking place, offering qualitative and quantitative evidence: the students participate in the discourse as effective members, leaving behind the previous negative experiences in school and changing to a scientific approach. These changes were evident outside of the club setting, to other teachers and their parents.

Last year I had the opportunity of collaborating in a similar initiative within the subject "project" in the INS Mont Perdut. In three months while being there I could see how this open approach manages to stimulate students, even the ones who hadn't had positive academic experience. As this paper states, the result of an open discourse was not a chaotic classroom, but the development of a community of learning where the interaction was focused on completing the common goal of completing the project at hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXA-jxXh88E