Increase the rigor of student thinking using question stems

From many years of working with ELLs I have learned that one key ingredient in their success is exposing them to the language of assessments- those sentence structures that often stump them. I have had many students tell me they don't know what a question is asking them and once I reword the question they are able to answer it. Finally I had a light bulb moment and decided kids need practice having discussions and writing pieces while using rigorous language.

Description, sequence, cause and effect, comparisons, predictions and inferences- kids can do all these, but can they show what they know using content specific language and more complex sentence structure?

To meet the language needs of  students and to better prepare them with content knowledge, for the past year I have implemented the following question stems to increase the rigor in my teaching and in their thinking. Since my job now entitles modeling lessons K-6, I have seen these work in all grade levels.

I prep the sentence stems by having them cut, laminated, and held together using a small binder ring and I carry a set of 6-7 of them every time I go in and model a lesson in any grade level.

In all content areas, when I want students to show their thinking as they describe, sequence, cause and effect, compare, predict and infer I ask them to use one of the stems from the appropriate color. The kids get so used to using them that the skill eventually transfers to their writing! This is a nonnegotiable in the classroom- they HAVE to refer back to the stems so that they acquire practice and eventually fluency in complex sentence structures.

Below you will find an example of how I used the stems with  4/5 year old, PreK students during an activity for comparing 2 animals. (This is part of training I am providing for all teachers in my school who have ELLs so that we can learn some strategies to meet the increasingly demanding requirements of TELPAS).

We used a thinking map to show we are comparing animals. (These cool animal cards are from Target $1.00).

After adding some ideas, I wrote 2 sentence stems and we discussed what we could write using the graphic organizer. It is important to first start to compare orally, and once our ideas are cemented, we move on to showing what we know in writing.

Even at this age, students can demonstrate their thinking using more and more complex sentence structures.

I hope that you found this post helpful. I know that the use of stems has helped our ELLs tremendously, but they can be used with ALL students. It's about thinking, therefore it's about increasing the rigor in our teaching!