Describe a program which encourages content area teachers to change their instructional styles during classroom discussions of textbook readings. Presents an associated five-stage model for linking teacher assessment procedures with professional growth. Notes that at each stage the model highlights what teachers experience and understand about…

Discusses a study examining the perspectives of three gifted middle school students on peer-led discussions and on each other. Highlights issues of voice, gender, interruption, and empowerment. (SR)

Focuses on university- and school-based teacher researchers attempting to alter or interrupt certain gendered discursive practices that threatened to reproduce some of the same inequities in classroom talk about texts that were noted in the past, but were not challenged. Finds four types of interactions: self-deprecating, discriminatory, and…

In a multicase study, adolescents at five culturally diverse sites across the United States engaged in face-to-face interactions as they reflected and reported on their perceptions of their own and other students' experiences in discussing regularly assigned content area texts. A social constructionist perspective provided the framework for the…

Characterizes middle school teachers' discussions of assigned readings from a variety of content area materials. Finds that the teachers' purpose appeared to influence the type of discussion they conducted and that their actual discussions seldom resembled their articulated abstract definitions of a good discussion. (KEH)

Since confusion continues to exist over what teachers mean when they say they are holding a discussion over previously assigned content reading materials, a study compared and contrasted the verbal and nonverbal interactions between teachers and students (or students and students) in eight content area classrooms in rural high schools in Georgia.…

Describes a study which examined classroom discussions of content area readings and attempted to modify the discussions to reflect more higher-order thinking and critical reading. Finds that teachers did elicit more inferential responses, even though they did not effect substantial and lasting changes in classroom interaction patterns. (RS)

This paper argues that classroom discussions are important sites of investigation, not for the purpose of identifying and prescribing effective discussion strategies, but for understanding why particular discursive strategies tend to dominate classroom talk and what might be done to alter such practices. The paper is grounded in feminist…

A study explored ways that three university-based and two middle-school-based teachers might begin to alter or interrupt discursive practices that have in the past permitted inequities in classroom talk about text to go unexamined and unchanged. A feminist theoretical frame guided the study's focus on gender as a lens for examining power…

To help teachers develop an awareness of how they structure a discussion, an instrument was constructed called the Assessment of Classroom Interaction Dynamics (ACID). Two expert judges and 26 trainees then participated in a study (1) to estimate interrater reliability between expert judges in the use of the ACID, (2) to assess the validity of the…

Drawing from a five-site multicase study, this paper examines three middle school students' perspectives on weekly classroom discussions that took place over a 6-month period in order to analyze the dynamics of classroom talk and how discussions can be affected by the teacher's interaction with the students. The three students were members of an…