Prior to this lesson, the teacher will have dedicated the previous class period to a class discussion on what group talk norms should be. The class will have created their own poster on talk norms, and it should have been posted on the walls. The norms poster can also be used to offer suggestions for group discussion behavior, and it can be posted in the classroom for students to refer to during group discussions as well. In addition, each student should have been provided with a copy of the sentence stems to scaffold their speaking interactions during today’s discussion, and these sentence stems should also have been posted in the classroom for student reference. Previous discussion of healthy discourse norms and sentence stems will help the lesson to go smoothly.

This lesson can be taught in many middle grade classes, including social studies, language arts, science, STEM, etc. The lesson will be included multiple times throughout the year to help students practice healthy discourse skills. Although the topic will change each time, the routines, class norms, talk stems, and Big Idea of the lesson will remain the same each time the lesson is repeated. As a topic for discussion, the teacher will preselect appropriate content from the resource Both Sides. Teachers should choose topics that are appropriate for their students and the content they are teaching.

Students will learn how to productively consider and discuss different sides of a topic with support using class norms, talk stems, and information from the website Both Sides. The class will practice active listening and healthy discourse skills to connect, challenge, support, and encourage their peers during productive group discussions.

Closed captions are available on the Both Sides videos to help students understand the video content. Multilingual learners can be paired with students of higher English proficiency to model and encourage them to participate in discussion. Talk stems and posters will be visible to students throughout the discussion to remind them of group norms and discussion starters.

Refer to the previously created class norms poster and talk stems mentioned in the Beforehand section to remind the class of behavioral expectations during discussion. Open the Both Sides website to the topic you have chosen for the class. Ask students for a quick feedback gesture to determine who has previously learned about the topic.

If there are vocabulary words in the Both Sides lesson that need pre‐​teaching, present them now (introduce no more than four to six new words).

Pass out two copies of the rubric (included in the PDF download) to show students how they will self‐​assess at the end of the activity and how they will assess their partner at the end of the discussion.

The class will watch both videos from the Both Sides website on the topic you have chosen. Allow students to take notes while watching the videos on points they may want to discuss. After the videos, the teacher will instruct the students to discuss the video topics in small groups, reminding them to follow the group norms and to use the talk stems for sentence starters. (The group size is at the teacher’s discretion.) The teacher circulates around the room to facilitate student discussions and to ensure that group norms are being followed. At the end of this time period, students are asked to fill out one copy of the rubric to self‐​assess their own performance in the discussion, and they will also fill out one copy of the rubric to evaluate their partner in the discussion. Both copies will be collected by the teacher and noted before being passed back to the students at a later time.

Summary: As a class, review the Big Idea of the lesson: We may think differently, but we can all:

• State our ideas with evidence
• Respect others’ viewpoints
• Challenge and encourage one another

As a class, students should discuss what they think they personally did well during the discussion, and what they see as an area to keep practicing. Review key points from the video discussed and ask if anyone’s viewpoint changed as a result of the discussion.

This lesson can be extended by having students further explore the topics by:

• Writing persuasive essays
• Creating presentations
• Researching topics discussed
• Formulating student surveys and using the resulting data to visualize student responses