The Juice’s Nonfiction Texts Encourage Powerful Classroom Discussions

One of the best, yet most challenging aspects of teaching students is their diversity of knowledge, interests, perspectives, and motivations. With so many differences, it can feel like an difficult task to engage each and every one of them and spark collective interest in every lesson.

Incorporating daily discussions can add a ton of benefits to your lessons and turn a dry lecture into a riveting debate or compelling conversation. Students can speak up and actively engage with the content being taught, instead of just sitting back and listening.

The Juice understands the importance of open discussion and active learning, which is why we’ve made it easy to incorporate these productive and thoughtful discussions right into your classroom. Let’s explore how you can use The Juice to elevate engagement and participation among your students.

What are the Benefits of Discussions?

As teachers and parents, it’s our job to captivate our students’ attention and get them excited about what we are teaching them. It’s our job to teach them more than just content, but also how to interact with and apply that content to life. 

Incorporating discussions into every lesson can make drastic changes to your students’ learning and classroom experience. So what are the benefits of adding discussion in the classroom?

Invites Participation

It doesn’t matter how interesting your material is, for some students sitting in a lecture can easily result in mid-class daydreaming or distracted doodling. Having the opportunity to add their own voice to the content being taught can increase class participation and engagement.

Sparks Interest

During class discussions, students get the chance to hear their teacher present the content. They also get to hear the thoughts and opinions of their classmates. Hearing different perspectives and opinions from peers challenge students to think about the content from many viewpoints. Some of these viewpoints may be familiar to them and some of them might be new. 

Improve Dialogue

Discussions are a great way to start dialogue among students, maybe even between students that don’t usually speak to one another. Classroom discussion provides a natural way for students to practice their conversation skills. They also teach students how to communicate respectfully with others who they might be less familiar with. Additionally, students get to practice their listening skills.

Improve Speaking Skills

Being able to speak publicly in front of a group is a necessary life skill for many professions. This could be anything from running your own presentation in front of an audience or simply speaking up during a staff meeting. Knowing how to confidently hold your own while speaking to others, asking questions, and arguing for change is a skill that needs to be practiced and class discussions are a great way to start. 

Students who struggle to speak up or tend to be more shy might need more time to prepare before feeling comfortable participating. Allow students a few minutes to write down their thoughts or discuss their ideas with a partner or small group before engaging the entire class in discussion. This can help students feel less overwhelmed and more prepared to share their thoughts with the whole class.

How Do The Juice’s Articles Facilitate Discussion? 

The Juice’s content allows teachers to incorporate productive discussions in each lesson. Every day, teachers receive 5 news articles that can be used as discussion starters.

These articles are relevant to what is currently happening in the world. They are a great way to get students interested in what is going on around them and stay informed with current events. Each article includes a standards-based quiz question that can help start conversations, debates, and discussions among students.

The Juice’s content is written to be unbiased, so students can form their own opinions on real-world topics. It is easy for students to follow along with family views or popular opinions from their home town and local news station; therefore, it is our job to expose them to the truth and push them to challenge preconceived beliefs and ideas.

The discussion doesn’t have to end in the classroom. The Juice plans to give families a free subscription. Learning and discussion doesn’t have to stop when the bell rings. Students can come home and continue the conversation with their parents, siblings, friends, or relatives. 

Since The Juice’s articles are relevant to what is currently going on in the world, students in a remote or hybrid learning environment can practice discussing ideas with their parents who are likely to be following along with current events. 

This type of learning increases critical thinking and prepares students for being on their own and forming personal thoughts and opinions about what is relevant and happening in their world and what they want to do about it.

Students are exposed to a wide variety of articles ranging from world news, to health, to arts and entertainment. Students can explore their interests and learn what parts of the world they are passionate about. 

The diversity of these daily articles makes it easy to use The Juice in any subject. Use The Juice to spark discussions in History, English, Science, Arts, and more! The Juice allows students to practice using the language of different disciplines and increase speaking skills across all subjects.

With a short length and four different reading levels, these articles can fit the needs of almost any classroom.

How Does the “Extra Juice” Facilitate Discussion? 

Some articles may need a little more information to really solidify the big picture of a topic presented. That’s where the “Extra Juice” comes in handy. 

If students don’t have enough background knowledge on a subject presented in one of these articles, the Extra Juice provides more information to dive deeper into the topic. 

This can spark the “investigative” drive of students and increase their interest into the topic. It also allows discussions to go further or to take a different perspective than what was presented in the original article.

How Do the Life Hack Videos Facilitate Discussion? 

Another excellent feature The Juice offers is a daily Life Hack video. These minute-long videos are STEAM-based and present neat pointers and tricks to solve every day issues. 

A 6th-grade teacher, who uses The Juice, starts off every class with the STEAM video to get students’ “motors running.” Students learning in the classroom and at home can easily replicate the activities in these videos. Students can converse with each other about how they would use the life hack in their own daily life or brainstorm other ideas to solve the same problem. 

These quick videos and short discussions can be a great warm-up for critical thinking skills needed for the upcoming lesson. It gets students talking and immediately interested in the class material.

What a great way to add some joy to the classroom and make learning more fun and relevant on days when class participation feels like pulling teeth.

Are You Ready to Add More Discussion to Your Classroom?

Signing up with The Juice can make lesson planning and adding discussions to your classroom a whole lot easier. Every day by 6 am you’ll receive a ton of relevant, non-partisan content that can start and guide strong discussions among your students. 

For resources on best practices and how to successfully run discussions in your own classroom, check out The University of Maryland’s guide to classroom discussions and how to keep conversations productive and on track.