Professional Development with Dr Cynthia Greenleaf

Today we had the privilege of listening to  Dr Cynthia Greenleaf a well known researcher who work has conducted research into children and adolescent literacy and translated it into teacher professional development.  We were given a number of challenges that were interesting and enjoyable and helped us to see different perspectives of the same issue.

Some of my key take outs were:

• What supports me in discussion and what gets in the way?
• Thinking about how to build knowledge through reasoning and thinking about evidence
• Evidence based argumentation which is different to persuasion.

If kids have abundant opportunities to collaborate together, they can rehearse having multiple perspectives in their head they can use it when they see fit - in-head reasoning skills - Dr Greenleaf calls it 'hedging'.