Spoken language in schools, now often branded as oracy, is seeing something of a resurgence of interest. This is well-founded and to be welcomed. Nevertheless, the policy-level coopting of oracy, as a concept open to various interpretations, raises questions concerning the desirable degree of prescription and conformity to be promoted in pupils'…

Mathematical ideas are developed and spread during argumentative whole class discussions between a teacher and her students. The goal of the current study is to characterize how ideas about quadratic functions emerge and are spread during a whole-class discussion among ninth graders. To this end, we recorded both discussions between pairs of…

In this study, 19 college-educated deaf adults with experience using interpreters in educational settings provided insights into how successfully various elements of classroom discourse were preserved through interpretation. The deaf adults, fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and experienced at using interpreters, watched educational…

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 article investigates the impact of various educational conditions, including educational tracking, aspirations and aspects of citizenship education, on the development of political trust among English youth, and assesses whether these effects last into early adulthood. Data from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study show a tendency of…

Communicating in dialogic space in our classrooms prepares us to participate in a democratic, inclusive, and civil society. Dialogic space is that elusive shared space of possibilities that exists among participants as we commit to engaging in ways that new knowledge can be created, presented, questioned, and developed as interpretations of our…

Collaboratively established talk rules, combined with teacher scaffolding, can help students talk together in ways that support learning. Most classrooms today utilise digital technology, and talk rules have proven beneficial for learning in this context. However, research on the strategies teachers use to make talk rules relevant in activities…

All students want to talk about ideas that interest them, but often, multilingual learners are not offered high-challenge, high-support opportunities to connect everyday experiences to mathematical ideas. We describe a single class period that connects students' everyday opinions with two-way tables and notions of independence.

Purpose: This essay articulates the vision of a flourishing classroom, which arguably is the ultimate goal of a positive approach to management education. By demonstrating how improvisational theater is the epitome of a flourishing ensemble, this essay proposes that there are some lessons educators can glean from improvisational theater in order…

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…

According to SHAPE America, the goal of physical education "is to develop physically literate individuals." Whitehead suggests that physically literate is a process that can be enriched with the development of the cognitive and affective learning domains through academic conversations. Although common to other content areas, the…

In considering goals for science education, it is conventional to make arguments for the utility of scientific knowledge for a variety of purposes. Less prominent are rationales based on the beauty or truth of science. In this paper, we examine how an approach to science education might be different if we shift the goals of communication to an…

Given the importance of teaching and learning argumentation, across disciplines for participation in academic and civil discourse, this article examines how dialogic space is created and sustained in classrooms where argument is taught and learned and, when it is created, what affordances it brings to learning argumentation. Dialogic space is a…

Across the curriculum, the questions that teachers ask in class direct learners' attention to key subject matter, and shape what they learn. This paper examines the types of questions that Chinese school Biology teachers ask, and considers how and why they vary their questioning in the context of scientific practices. Six teachers from four…

This article discusses the place of thematic coherence in various approaches to educational dialogue and proposes a unifying approach to the analysis of thematic coherence of classroom conversations based on research in educational dialogue, philosophy of language and recent advances in linguistic research on discourse structure. Addressing the…