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,…

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…

This study investigates the structure of discourse children initiate by asking inquisitive questions. In total, 301 question sequences were analyzed, taking into account the discourse analysis procedure. Generally, the analysis concluded that although children were demonstrating their epistemic stance, they used different question structures than…

This article discusses classroom conditions that support the co-creation of dialogic space--where our different ideas and perspectives are in conversation with others such that we might take in what other people are saying and be open to it affecting our thinking. Drawing on ethnographic case study data, we provide context to illustrate ways this…

Discover the transformative power of early conversations on racial equity and cultural awareness with "Little Learners, Big Hearts." This heartwarming teacher's guide fosters empathy and equity in young minds. Grounded in heart centered learning, it seamlessly weaves principles of hope, self-education, acknowledgment, resolution, and…

Individuals on the autism spectrum often require additional support in the area of social communication. Peer mediated interventions target these areas by incorporating peers into the intervention. To date, most studies have focused on selecting one or two peers as models or peer interventionists with only a few studies implementing a class-wide…

This case study was undertaken to characterise the interventions made by a kindergarten teacher during a multiplicative structure problem-solving lesson. The study findings show that when she realised the children were having difficulty, she provided assistance to enable them to find the right answer. When the children gave an incorrect response,…

Questions regarding the construction of mathematical authority have implications for learning, specifically for students' views of themselves as mathematics learners and doers with valuable contributions. We consider the ideas proposed by eight first-grade students who had the most airtime during 12 lessons of a classroom teaching experiment. We…

Turn and Talk is widely used in early-grade classrooms, but very little rigorous research or evidence-based guidance has been offered to teachers. In this exploratory paper, we take the first step toward establishing a teacher-friendly discussion on this common technique. After briefly describing the Turn and Talk technique, we first ask: What…

Diverse children's literature can support understandings of our world as culturally, linguistically, and socially rich. It can cultivate empathy and understanding, and open a dialogic space of possibilities. In this article, we examine how "purposefully selected" children's literature prepares needed conditions for dialogic space:…

Many American Jewish day schools, where most staff and students adhere to Ashkenazic traditions, perpetuate the normativity of Ashkenazic practice and culture, both reflecting and reinforcing the status of Sephardic communities as "minorities within a minority." This article draws on Sephardic adults' recollections of the…

Background: Help-seeking research has traditionally inferred behavioural responses to the need for help from post-hoc reflections and experiments outside of the classroom context. Aim: We aimed to gain an ecologically valid understanding of the help-seeking process by examining the association between pupils' task-specific perceptions and their…

This paper reports on a study concerning the social nature of young students' informal inferential reasoning. Employing inferentialism as a background theory, we examine cognitive and sociocultural aspects of reasoning that arose during group discussions as well as trace relations between those aspects. Following a design experiment approach, we…

This research reports on the teacher language and gesture that contributed to shifts in thinking about the equal sign and equations observed in twenty kindergarteners who took part in an early algebra intervention. Our analysis revealed ways in which the teacher used language and gesture to support students in moving from describing and working…