The teacher next to my classroom, Mr. Quale, said, "you know, they don't listen to each other."  What he meant was that during class discussions our students don't hear each other's points and consider them when responding.  I didn't want to believe Mr. Quale's point, but I couldn't deny it either.  I decided to test it out.  During preceding class discussions, I would ask students to repeat what the person before them said, and they wouldn't be able to.  Then I remembered some marriage advice that I got a while back: try repeating what the other said by saying, "so, what I hear you saying is .  . ."  Practicing that with my wife was funny because we would totally miss what the other was saying, and summarizing what the other said before we made our own point allowed us to correct any misunderstandings.  I've brought this strategy to the classroom.  We are practicing repeating what the student before said using the sentence frame and then getting to what we think.  See how it goes here.