Want to build a discussion skills program?
by Harriet Piercy Harriet Piercy has taught English at London secondary schools since 2015 and held a number of roles as a curriculum leader. She is currently joint head of the English faculty at Haggerston School in Hackney. She was recently a Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching scholar at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, undertaking…
Over 2,000 students in grades 6-11 responded to the student survey we sent following the first R.E.A.L.® cycle of the 2023-2024 school year. The results were fascinating! While we saw some expected areas of growth – we usually see students master “Excerpting” early, and we did once again! – we also noticed some surprising patterns…
R.E.A.L.® Discussion is a professional development program that equips faculty to teach, measure, and celebrate discussion skills – which students use in the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the court, and, even, at the grocery store (said one sixth grade girl) and on dates (shared a ninth grade boy)! The system is based on the…
R.E.A.L.® Discussion is a professional development program that equips faculty to teach, measure, and celebrate discussion skills – which students use in the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the court, and, even, at the grocery store (said one sixth grade girl) and on dates (shared a ninth grade boy)! The whole system is based on…
R.E.A.L.® Discussion is a professional development program that empowers faculty to teach their students how to thrive in discussion – in the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the court, and in their communities. R.E.A.L.® gives faculty and students shared language and classroom routines to make discussion come alive in their classrooms. The whole system is…
It’s the start of the school year, and we’re eager to see how our R.E.A.L.® practitioners roll out R.E.AL.® in their classrooms this year. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that the coming weeks and months will reveal incredible growth for students who learn our framework. How do we know? We collect…
One of the best parts of working at R.E.A.L.® Discussion is that we learn as much from the teachers who deploy our program as they learn from us. Callie Hammond, a middle school English teacher trained in the R.E.A.L.® method, recently shared her report “Learning How to Talk: How Teaching Middle School Girls the Steps…
One of the best parts of our job is seeing how the skills students learn from the R.E.A.L.® program directly affect their performance in class and elsewhere. Our dashboards allow us to gain insight into how students grow in multiple ways — in how they participate in class, in their comfort in expressing themselves, in…
by Emily Gromoll, Director of Program We began this school year excited to launch R.E.A.L. Discussion Dashboards, our new action research tool, but we were not sure what to expect. We hoped for a few things: first, that we could learn more about which areas – namely, discussion skills, sense of belonging, growth mindset, etc….