Productive talk is structured talk designed to support students in developing a deep understanding of the content (Michaels et al., 2008): a characteristic of high-quality mathematics instruction (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). Students who engage in talk during mathematics class have opportunities to make sense of the…

No higher-order skill will be more important for pupils to develop in the twenty-first century than critical thinking. Schools should integrate it into their curricula, thereby allowing students to acquire new skills in preparation for a dynamic and rapidly changing labour market. Educators, psychologists, and philosophers agree on the importance…

This brief is part of a series that highlights key features of high-quality instruction for English learners and the role formative assessment plays in their success. Formative assessment supports teachers to enact these features by providing them with tools to gauge and react to student learning in real-time. These practices also support students…

Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before…

The paper addresses the potential relationships between shared authority in mathematics classrooms and students' mathematical reasoning. Even though tensions and challenges related to shared authority are explicated in the literature, there are few examples of how these issues play out in mathematics teaching. We investigate the case of a…

This article takes stock of the current trends in research, policy and practice regarding the role of language in the dialogic classroom. The article uses the policies of two different educational jurisdictions as counterpoints to highlight the different ways that oral language can be positioned within primary curricula. It reflects on current and…

This study investigated students' turn-taking patterns during dialogic collaborative problem solving, with analysis based on the participation-shift analytical framework. 168 primary fourth-grade students were assigned to 42 groups and worked on three mathematical problems for a total of 30 minutes. Group-level analysis revealed that most students…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether justifying one's own social knowledge (moral, societal, psychological) toward complex social-moral issues through collaborative argumentation was associated with the improvement of social perspective taking for elementary students. A total of 129 5th graders (52% female, Mage = 10.98) from six…

Background: Over the past three decades, researchers have increasingly advocated for pedagogical practices that privilege exploration, collaboration, problem-solving, and hands-on projects in K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S.T.E.M.). Many researchers have studied the efficacy of these instructional practices, but there has…

The current study examined the development of early adolescents' social perspective taking (SPT) through collaborative small-group discussions. A total of 250 fifth-graders were assigned to three conditions, Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR) discussions, Read-Aloud (RA) and Regular Instruction (RI). SPT was assessed before and after the…

Background: Learning communities is a collaborative framework that can assist the adoption of the educational innovation of digital technologies, through reflective discourse and student-centred pedagogy. Purpose: Framed within this framework, the study aimed to examine--a) the nature of elementary preservice teachers' interactions, collaboration,…

The skill of collaboration is fundamental for every student as a future participant of a global society. Students with learning disabilities feel excluded amongst peers in a traditional classroom setting, specifically elementary students with learning disabilities in the area of collaboration. The overall purpose of this basic qualitative study…

The purpose of this study was to enhance our understanding of the relationship between collaborative talk and metacognitive talk during group mathematical problem-solving. Research suggests that collaborative talk may mediate the use of metacognitive talk, which in turn is associated with improved learning outcomes. However, our understanding of…

Efficient collaborative learning relies on productive interaction among learners. Previous studies have suggested that group gender composition might affect the group dynamics. While previous studies have generally focused on the learning performance of different gender groups, relatively little effort has been devoted to scrutinising the learning…

This article adopts a Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue to explore the affordances of virtual book clubs, and how they can foster dialogues and encourage dialogic thinking in students. Drawing on a qualitative case study of 11-year-old students participating in an online book club, we explore how digital book clubs open dialogic spaces for…