Raise Your Voices: Inquiry, Discussion, and Literacy Learning

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In a collection of chapters from high school teachers and university researchers, Raise Your Voices offers English language arts teachers one-stop shopping to learn how to foster dialogic classrooms and how to prompt, sustain, connect, and assess classroom discussions, especially discussions about issues that adolescents find consequential. The chapters explore both the basics for facilitating discussion to support literacy learning and the principles for assessing the progress and effect of discussion and for including all students in lively dialogue. Taken together, the entries in this book envision the English language arts classroom as a supportive environment for authentic inquiry and for the genuine democratic processes involved in grappling together with tough perennial and contemporary issues.

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Teachers will find answers to many questions they may have about dialogic instruction in Raise Your Voices: Inquiry, Discussion, and Literacy Learning. Unlike many, perhaps most books on this topic, it is written from the trenches by experienced teachers. Dialogic instruction is increasingly challenged by prescriptive lesson plans that make little room for authentic questions and open-ended questions. Dialogic instruction is moreover particularly challenging for new teachers who may not always know how to interpret pauses in student responses to their questions: Did they ask a dumb question or a challenging thought-provoking one Silence can be hard for a new inexperienced teacher to understand. Fortunately, they will find experienced guidance to such questions inRaise Your Voices: Inquiry, Discussion, and Literacy Learning. -- Martin Nystrand, Louise Durham Mead Professor of English Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Author Bio

Thomas M. McCann is a professor of English at Northern Illinois University, where he contributes to the teacher licensure program. His books include Transforming Talk into Text and Literacy and History in Action (Teachers College Press) and the co-authored Talking in Class (NCTE, 2006), The Dynamics of Writing Instruction (Heinemann, 2010), and Teaching Matters Most (Corwin Press, 2012). Andrew Bouque teaches English at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. In his 19 years in public high schools, he has worked to build classroom communities for students to find, develop, and refine their spoken voices and craft arguments that matter. Dawn Forde is a teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School and has been learning from her students for the past seventeen years. She has presented at local, state, and national conferences, primarily focusing on discussion and its effects on literacy and student engagement. Elizabeth A. Kahn taught English language arts for 36 years and served as English department chair; she now teaches in the English teacher education program at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. She has co-authored several books, including Discussion Pathways to Literacy Learning (NCTE 2018), The Dynamics of Writing Instruction (Heinemann 2010), and Writing About Literature (NCTE 1984 and 2009, updated edition). Carolyn Calhoun Walter taught English students for thirty years at both public and private high schools and now supervises student teachers for Northern Illinois University. Ms. Walter is a regular presenter at national conferences and has co-authored Designing and Sequencing Pre-Writing Activities and Writing about Literature, and Discussion Pathways to Literacy Learning.