This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 204 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode we'll be sharing the real talk strategy, a simple approach to getting your students

to have richer, more natural, and more authentic classroom discussions.

For a lot of teachers, the idea of classroom discussion often pales in comparison to the reality.

What we want is for our students to lean in to listen to each other, spontaneously offer thought

provoking questions, build on each other's ideas. We want them to go deep to really get into it,

and yet many of us find that this is not an easy thing to manufacture, especially when it comes to

discussions that have anything to do with the content of our coursework. On this podcast I have offered

a number of strategies that can help to facilitate better discussions. Try episodes 154, 109, 103,

and especially 28 for lots of ideas. Today we'll be talking about another one, brought to us by

ELA teacher Jessica Kanata, who shares lots of ideas like this one on the website eB academics.

The strategy is called quite simply real talk. She developed it after realizing that the more

engineered discussion structure she had tried, just more inspiring students to have natural

conversations. Once she figured out the real talk approach, she got much better results,

so today we'll be showing you how to do the same thing in your classroom.

Before we get started, I'd like to thank EverFive for sponsoring this episode.

Want to prepare your students for career and life success but short on time?

Busy teachers use EverFive's standards aligned, ready-made digital lessons to teach students

to thrive in an ever-changing world. Interactive game-based lessons designed by experienced educators

help you engage students at all grade levels and bring critical real-world skills,

like financial readiness, emotional literacy, STEM, and much more to your classroom.

Thanks to EverFive's partners, all K through 12 schools and students have access to EverFive's

...