How can teachers lead meaningful and compelling literature conversations? To answer this question, Andrew and Julie welcome Amanda Butler to the podcast. Amanda is a homeschool mom, tutor, and Vice President of Training and Support for Classical Conversations. In this episode Amanda shares her number one tool for leading literature discussions: the five common topics of dialectic. Amanda explains how she guides her students through each of the topics, asking questions along the way to help them think about and engage with the books they are reading.
What are these five topics? They are definition, comparison, circumstance, relationship, and testimony. Together, these topics help students exercise critical thinking and examine the reasoning of why they think what they think. To learn how you can utilize these five topics as a springboard for developing your students’ rhetorical skills, listen to the podcast. Hopefully, you will be encouraged to add them to your own literary discussions with your pupils!
† Contains distinctly Christian content
