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…

Learning circles has a long tradition in the Nordic countries as a model for adult non-formal education, but has gained little scholarly attention and is thus sparsely theorised. The purpose of this article is to discuss the revitalisation of learning circles as highly relevant in times of what we term 'social innovation imperatives'. To…

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…

This essay examines a half-term of Year 9 work on "An Inspector Calls," with a particular focus on group discussion, writing in role and class reading of the text. I argue that extensive talking before writing is an invaluable way to elicit pupil insight; I then argue that this is necessarily a collaborative endeavour. I then go on to…

This article discusses a partnership with two different civic education organizations to study three different student-centered discussion designs. In one study, the authors worked with the Close Up Foundation. Close Up is a non-profit that annually brings 20,000 high school and middle school students from all 50 states and U.S. territories to…

Discussions are one of the activity types that help students build their content-related background knowledge, understanding, and concepts through various communication approaches. Students express and share their perspectives and ideas with other students through a small- or large-group discussion. The formats of discussions may vary; they may be…

In the era of remote learning courses, the humanities instructor struggled more than most to translate the many familiar techniques of close reading to the unfamiliar realm of technology. Oftentimes instructors have depended on facsimiles of traditional methods: a shared passage annotated by the class digitally, or small groups sent to individual…

World Café (WC) is a structured methodology that provides an opportunity for collective thinking through open dialogue. The WC concept affords the opportunity for individuals to engage in the sharing of ideas and knowledge. Participants rotate through timed discussions on different themes with different groups of individuals, providing for an…

The purpose of this study was to identify and categorize in-the-moment teaching moves which support productive general social norms and sociomathematical norms during dialogic instruction by drawing on transcripts of classroom episodes. To understand how teachers construct in-the-moment teaching moves, this paper is grounded in a revised version…

The authors share an online collaborative problem-solving activity that integrates support for students' developing conceptual understanding, focused engagement, and positive feelings of agency and identity.

Argumentative and proving skills are considered key competencies in mathematics. Collaborative learning activities, by fostering students' production of conjectures and arguments, could contribute strongly to the development of these skills. In this paper, we present the design of a e-learning collaborative environment, whose goal is to promote in…

Collaborative learning can be a worthwhile and valuable part of a student's online course experience, and interpersonal exchanges among members of an online course community often rely on greater intentionality within the design of the learning experience. We present a synergistic framework for strategic design of collaborative learning in the…

To identify clicker questions likely to provoke rich and engaging student discussions, we recorded the percentage of the class voting on each option on every clicker question used throughout each semester, encompassing nineteen sections of introductory statistics, taught by three instructors. Working from the hypothesis that seeing student votes…

Collaborative inquiry and conversational learning are approaches to management education and learning in which participants construct knowledge together through dialogue. Both approaches advocate letting go of control to allow insight to emerge through free-flowing conversation, but little has been written about how to accomplish this.…

The article presents a blended dialogic socio-constructivist pedagogy for language learning, emphasizing the importance of both individual and social aspects of learning. It argues that technology alone does not transform pedagogy; rather, it is the approach to technology that matters. The pedagogy combines personal freedom for reflection and…