blogging about books

April's Educational Leadership contains an article by Jennifer Stewart-Mitchell "Blogging about Books." In trying to encourage student participation in meaningful discussion, Jennifer utilized blogs and a framework- 3C's and a Q. I was unfamiliar with this strategy and see lots of ways it could be used in a classroom.

• C- compliment
• C- comment
• C- connect
• Q question

Sentence stems could be made available to help guide a discussion. (An abundance of online sources of starters are available.)
Compliment:

• I liked how...
• You did a great job …
• Using that image/quote/video/etc really helped to showcase...

Comment:

• I agree that...
• I disagree about...
• You make a good point about..., but I want to point out that...
• We are in agreement that …. because …
• While …, it must be said that …
• One exception to that idea is...
• It should not be forgotten that...
• This brings us to another issue. …
• What makes … even worse is …
• From this we can conclude that …

Connect: (text to self, text to text, text to world, text to media)

• When you mentioned ..., it made me think about...
• When you say..., it reminds me of...
• I also have seen this when/where …
• Doesn't that make you think of …
• I understand how … felt because …
• If … happened to me, then I would do/feel/say...
• I am different from …, because I …

Question:

• Why do you think … so far?
• What do you mean when you say...?
• If that is the case then …?
• What evidence supports the idea that …?
• Since the characters said …, what do you think will happen next? Why?

This kind of framework would help student craft responses that are better than "He's right" or "Good job." They encourage continuation of the conversation. For students with executive function challenges, it provides a jumping point and sense of security because they know what is expected. The teacher should definitely model using the framework for students and have both hard copies and posted copies of sentence starters to use.