Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. This thoughtful book identifies fice core communication skills -- elaborating and clarifying; supporting ideas with evidence; building on and/or challenging ideas; paraphrasing; and synthesizing -- to help students hold productive conversations across content areas. It describes how to use conversations to build academic vocabulary and grammar, critical thinking and literacy skills, and abstract essential understandings. The book includes activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess