This article describes academic conversations in kindergarten classrooms and how they vary across two different instructional activities: teacher-led and student-led book conversations. Conversations about texts have been recommended to improve the comprehension of kindergarten through third graders. The research was conducted in a K-8 urban,…

In this paper, we present the findings from the first year of our study into the use of talk with young children (ages 6 and 7) in their mathematics lessons following four teachers' implementation of dialogic strategies. Based on Alexander's (2017) dialogic principles and notions of productive talk, we delivered a professional implementation…

An essential element of creative musicianship is the ability to seek, provide, and respond to feedback. This article presents a method of teaching elementary music students to respond to creative work in a way that is productive and uplifting, using a discussion protocol. Grounded in the work of Lerman and Borstel's critical response and Seidel's…

Interest in teachers' moves to classroom discourse has started to increase since how teachers respond to students' thinking influences students' learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the moves used by one sixth grade mathematics teacher at a public middle school in Turkey to support student reasoning in mathematics instruction and…

Background: With a growing new materialism paradigm and research on multimodality, there is an increasing attention on the role of material objects in science teaching and learning. However, there is currently no available framework, coding scheme, or method of inquiry to specifically analyze the use of material objects in science meaning-making.…

Classroom conversation between students is complex and used for multiple reasons every day. Student dialogue also allows teachers insight into student's learning. This article presents findings from a qualitative study that used dialogism, a branch of sociocultural theory, to investigate in depth student to student (inter-student) questioning…

Many teachers around the country are doing Number Talks in their classrooms. This powerful and accessible technique can open teachers' eyes to how their students talk about their own thinking and can help students see themselves as mathematical thinkers and describers of their own thinking. Teachers use annotations of student thinking to visually…

An increasing body of research has explored patterns of interaction and peer support among young learners. Although some studies suggest that young learners can engage in collaboration when interacting on tasks, other studies indicate the opposite. Moreover, despite the claims that peer collaboration is conducive to learning, studies have not paid…

Classroom discourse serves an important role in language, literacy, and other content area learning in early childhood and elementary classrooms. In this article, the authors define discourse as it relates to teaching and learning and overview the background of research on the topic. Then classroom discourse is reconsidered in the current context,…

While prior research has established the benefits of dialogic teaching-and-learning practices, their widespread school implementation has proven challenging. How might research on dialogic education help teachers enrich their everyday practices? In this article, we adapt and apply an established conceptual framework to previously published…

In the wake of the events of recent years, most school leaders and educators recognize that taking equity seriously demands new attention to the instructional experiences that occupy most of students' time in school. In what follows, we bring together key literature on ambitious teaching-learning and equitable classroom practice in an observation…

This paper complicates oracy by attending to moments of vibrancy and stillness in a public school classroom, where children were expected to follow particular rules that governed their bodily movement and language use. I argue that children's talk in classrooms cannot be separated from the making of meaning at the intersection of human bodies,…

Over three decades ago, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 1991) proposed that "for students to develop the ability to formulate problems, to explore, conjecture, and reason logically, to evaluate whether something makes sense, classroom discourse must be founded on mathematical evidence" (p. 34). As math interventionists…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the quality of class talk during episodes corresponding to different levels of generalization. A total of 10 sessions in two classrooms in grade 7 were videotaped. A mixed approach was adopted to analyze the videotaped sessions. The findings show that triadic dialog was the dominant mode of interaction…

This article argues that provisional language is important for creating a dialogic space between speakers, where ideas are open for discussion; where participants respect each other's viewpoints; and where the goal is to encourage and explore multiple perspectives. Whilst much of the research on children's talk in the classroom focuses on the…