Chris,
I attended the First Annual Whole Brain Teaching Conference in
Alexandria, LA. in June (17-19). It was the best conference I'd been
to. Thank you!

You did a teaching on the steps of critical thinking (7 steps, I
think). On one part you started with baby talk and ended with college talk. On another part you started with the question and ended with flip-flopping the question. I would appreciate it very much if you could email me those
steps. I did write them down but I must have misplaced them. Thanks
again!

Earle Brown

Earle ...
The game is called "College Talk" and the basic idea is to get students to speak in fairly complex paragraphs, to make it simpler to write similar paragraphs. Think of the game as "oral writing." All you will need is a list of simple questions, like "what is your favorite food?" "What did you do last summer?" "What is a good person?," etc. Then, you ask students the question and they give ever more elaborate answers as you move up in "levels" ... the levels are arranged as grades ...

Kindergarten: answer the question with 1 to 3 words
Second grade: answer the question with 4 to 7 words
Fifth grade: answer the question by repeating the question as part of the answer. For example, "What did you do this summer?" Instead of answering, "I did nothing," the student says, "This summer I did nothing."
Sixth grade: Answer the question as you did above, but include an "adder" sentence ... a sentence that adds information. For example, "This summer I went fishing. My family and I drove to a great river in Montana."
Seventh grade: Answer a question as you did above but add a sentence that has the word "because" and another "adder" sentence. For example, "This summer I went fishing in Montana. It took use eight hours to drive there. My family loves fishing because it is exciting. There is nothing like catching free fish!"
-- as you move up in "grades" you can ask students to add the words "for example" as a new type of sentence and then "for example" with an "adder sentence" to give more details about the example ... or you can ask them to add a sentence that is a metaphor or simile with an "adder" ... or you can ask them to add combinations of the above ... but always, they should use at least one "adder" after each type of sentence.

Eventually, you teach them to finish with a "flip flop answer" sentence as their conclusion. If the first sentence was "This summer I went fishing" then the concluding sentence, the "flip flop answer" is "I went fishing this summer."

So, the basic idea is start with an answer sentence, add other types of sentences, each one followed by an adder and then conclude with the flip flop answer as the last sentence ... also, obviously, this works very well as a "teach-okay" assignment.

The big advantage of this game is that students can orally practice using various types of sentences in a clearly structured format ... and the use of "adder" sentences solves one of the largest problems in student writing ... lack of details!