Conversational Prompts Worksheets

Core Standard

As students continue through the digital information age the art of the conversation has all but disappeared. People rarely take the time to be critical of how they interact with others conversationally. There is a great deal of evidence to support the notion that regular active conversations help improve our well being and mental health. Being able to share your point of view with others is often a difficult task for some students who do not get much opportunity to do so at home. You will find that students that come from larger families are more comfortable with the entire concept because they are constant forced to interact with siblings. Being about to hold a productive and very essential dialogue with others is something that gets much easier with experience. In this section of our site, we feature a series of prompts that will hopefully help you kick of discussions between individuals or groups in a written or spoken format.

Conversational Prompts Worksheets:

Making Basic Conversation - Asking polite, general questions is a great way to start a conversation with someone that you don't know.

Prompts of Life - Do you think YouTube is a good thing or a bad thing? Who is your favorite fictional character?

Meeting Someone New - What would you ask someone that you just met?

The New Kid in School - These are logical questions you might ask a new student in your class.

Four Seasons - The things you might ask other people about each season.

Kitchen Conversation - Do you like spicy food? Did your parents cook dinner every night? Would you rather cook or bake? How did you learn to cook?

Get Engaged - If you could be any insect, what insect would you like to be?

Start a Conversation - How do you approach someone to start talking?

Yucky Stuff! - What’s the yuckiest thing you've ever seen? What the yuckiest sound you've ever heard? What the yuckiest thing you've ever smelled?

Tell Me About the One - If you could only take one subject in school, which one would you want to take?

Interesting Stuff - Who’s the most interesting person you follow on social media? What's the best costume you ever wore for Halloween?

I'd Like to Get to Know You - Things that are not easily asked out loud.

Thoughts of Warm - What's a crazy way to travel that you would like to try? If you could invent a creature to be your pet, what would it be?

Talking About Friendship - Do you have to spend time with someone in person in order to be good friends?

Start a Controversial Conversation - Is it okay to gossip about people? If you know something bad about someone that you care about, should you tell them?

The Importance of Productive Everyday Student Conversations


Many of us spend a great deal of time-sharing information with others in both formal and informal situations. There is a growing concern that this action is transforming from the physical to the digital world. Digital communication is such a less effective means of communication for many different reasons. While digital communication ultimate allows you to transfer or receive a message, it often comes with many less desirable aspects that lessen the affect of the communication process. Online or digital communication is a passive mode of message communication. Students are often scrolling and so over stimulated that they cannot focus on any one specific message. The lack of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions or body language leads to digital messages not being received or understood as well as face-to-face conversations. This often leads to the topics that are discussed being more superficial in nature.


We all naturally enjoy sharing our thoughts with others. Children learn at an early age how to share their thoughts with their parents. Several studies have shown that parents that focus on holding meaningful conversations with their children often have teens and young adults that excel at verbal communication. Like anything, we get better at communicating with more practice. A study just before the turn of the century showed that there is huge divide between high and low incomes household children when it comes to being able to communicate. It is theorized that the high-income children had more language opportunities and as a result were more comfortable with communicating. We, as teachers, an opportunity to bridge that divide a bit by encouraging well intention conversations in our classes and treating everyone as equal.


There are a number of things to consider about your classroom in order to promote proactive student conversations. It begins will establishing your classrooms are a safe environment to explore discourse between students and the work at hand. This is one where students will not be subjected to ridicule by their peers or teacher themselves for just about anything appropriate that they wish to discuss. This can be heightened by taking it upon yourself as a teacher to encourage helpful discourse. You should encourage everything to be focused on evidence.