Discussion Move Bingo

Class began the usual way. Students who needed to complete their point of view checkpoint did that today, but if they didn’t finish, they will finish tomorrow. Independent reading time was extended today for those that were done/proficient, so students could have time to work on this.

After IR, I took some time to talk to students about our April calendar and a few changes to it as well as reflect on the ALICE drill yesterday.

Next, we moved into literature circles, and today’s journal prompt is below:

Experts have identified seven qualities of a good reader. According to this list, a few things good readers do are as follows: they make predictions, visualize events of the text, and recognize confusion. Your journal today is based on these ideas. Answer one or more of the questions below:

  • What are the predictions you have? Explain. You can be general or decide to make predictions about something specific.
  • What scene or scenes have you been able to visualize the best? What was it about that passage that enabled you to picture it? (You could reference a specific passage.)
  • What parts have been especially confusing to you? How have you overcome that confusion? What are you still confused about?

On Tuesday, Mrs. Ruff and myself visited in with each group for about 10 minutes and kept track of the discussion moves students were making. This wasn’t for a grade; instead, it was so students could use the feedback to continue tracking their progress toward proficiency in the learning targets.

Today they received that feedback and transcribed it onto their purple tracking sheet. Overall, students’ conversations have improved greatly already, and this is not only evidenced by the data they received today, but it is also clear through the time I have spent with each group. I gave students a few tips for improvement. For example, if a student is not yet at a + with summing things up, here is a sentence frame I suggested to help with that:

I agree/disagree with what you said about _______ because ______ .

Also, I suggested that students KEEP THEIR BOOKS ON THEIR DESKS. This will make them much more likely to reference the text in a specific way.

For our discussion today, students played discussion bingo ignorer to encourage them to expand their use of the discussion moves and to combine them. The link to discussion move bingo is here.

We ended class with a quick reflection. I asked students to think about their first conversation with their groups and answer this question: How has using the discussion moves changed the discussions in your groups? The conversations the students had about this were insightful.


  1. Read for 25 minutes.
  2. Complete literature circle day 6 reading/task for TUESDAY