Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes, 710 words
Primary Audience: Intermediate and Secondary Teachers, Coaches
The Context: As a dual language educator, I’m always on the lookout for new strategies to support language development. “Stronger & Clearer,” a protocol by researcher, author, and consultant Jeff Zwiers, incorporates oral rehearsal, peer feedback, and revision to support students in creating a final response that is clear and strong. It can be used in a variety of situations, such as answering a specific question in response to a text/video, explaining how to solve a math problem, or sharing an opinion.
How it works:
| Step 1 | Students jot notes or write a short response to a prompt |
| Step 2 | Partner A shares, Partner B listensPartner B gives feedback and asks clarifying questions |
| Step 3 | Partner B shares, Partner A listensPartner A gives feedback and asks clarifying questions |
| Step 4 | Students add or revise their response based on the feedback they receive from their partner and ideas gleaned from their partner’s response to make it Stronger & Clearer. |
| Step 5 | Repeat Steps 2-4 with a different partner. Repeat again if time allows. |
| Step 6 | Students write their final response, incorporating all of the new ideas they heard from their partners’ feedback and responses, to make it Stronger & Clearer. |
The Details: Here’s a Stronger & Clearer lesson I did with 3rd and 4th graders during an opinion unit.
Call students to the meeting area to launch the lesson: We have been working on writing opinions about many different topics. Today, I want to teach you that one way we can make our writing stronger is by rehearsing with a partner before we write. Rehearsing means to practice saying it out loud and then listening to our partner’s feedback to get new ideas that will make our piece stronger and clearer.
Explain the Stronger & Clearer process with a chart that shows students what they will be doing.
First, we are going to have 5 minutes to think about our opinion and reasons. You can use this graphic organizer to help you. Write your opinion in the middle, and then jot some notes about your reasons and evidence that supports your opinion. Students can do their thinking at your meeting place or you can send them back to their desks to work.
Call students back together. Review how students will share with each other (steps 2-3) with a focus on how partners can respond to each other: While one partner shares their opinion and reasons, the other partner’s job is to listen carefully and think about how the ideas could be clearer and stronger. Here are some questions or feedback you can tell your partner. Read them with me (go through the “Partner Prompts” chart).
Students partner up and share/respond. Set a timer to let partnerships know when to switch roles. When both partners have had a chance to share and receive feedback, call students to the meeting area. Everyone just received feedback about their response, and you got to listen to your partner’s response, which might have given you some new ideas or language to use. Right now, add some notes about your ideas to make your opinion stronger or clearer.
Next, students meet with a new partner and repeat steps 2-4. After, call students together one last time. Now that you have shared your response out loud and received feedback and ideas from your partners, you are ready to write a stronger and clearer opinion. Be sure to think about the feedback you heard from your partners and include those new ideas to make it as strong and clear as possible.
One final thing: All students benefit from oral rehearsal, peer feedback, and peer models in writing, but it is especially effective for multilingual learners. Oral rehearsal with feedback allows students to experiment with different language structures and vocabulary to find out if the language is clear to the listener/reader. Listening to the responses of their peers also provides MLs with new language structures they can try out themselves. This is what makes the Stronger & Clearer protocol powerful for all students, but especially for MLs.
Go Deeper: For more information about Stronger & Clearer, as well as other strategies for structured student interactions and developing academic conversations, check out Jeff Zwiers’ website.
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