Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas.
In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas:

1. Elaborating and Clarifying
2. Supporting Ideas with Evidence
3. Building On and/or Challenging Ideas
4. Paraphrasing
5. Synthesizing

• Academic vocabulary and grammar
• Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application
• Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing
• An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support

The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

The Common Core State Standards require students to do more with knowledge and language than ever before. Rather than be mere consumers of knowledge, students must now become creators, critics, and communicators of ideas across disciplines. Yet in order to take on these new and exciting roles, many students need daily teaching with an extra emphasis on accelerating their academic communication skills.

Common Core Standards in Diverse Classrooms: Essential Practices for Developing Academic Language and Disciplinary Literacy describes seven research-based teaching practices for developing complex language and literacy skills across grade levels and disciplines: using complex texts, fortifying complex output, fostering academic interaction, clarifying complex language, modeling, guiding, and designing instruction. Most important, you will find clear descriptions and examples of how these essential practices can—and should—be woven together in real lessons. The book:

• Clarifies how to support the learning of complex language that students need for reaching Common Core and other standards
• Provides practical ways to realize the instructional shifts needed with the implementation of new standards in diverse classrooms
• Includes frameworks and descriptions on how to develop students' complex language, speaking, and writing
• Helps maximize strategies and tools for building system-wide capacity for sustained growth in the practices

Common Core Standards in Diverse Classrooms is a concise guide for helping us improve our practices to strengthen two vital pillars that support student learning: academic language and disciplinary literacy.