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…

This study was situated at Mountain Middle School (Pseudonym). Students at Mountain Middle School often engage in collaborative compositions embedded within week-long multidisciplinary and multiage units of study called Odysseys. These units of study and the collaborative composition projects are classified as formal cooperative learning. Johnson…

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…

Although it is not a new idea, discourse continues to be a topic of discussion among teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in mathematics education. The National Council of Teachers (NCTM) and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM 2010) describe mathematics classrooms as discourse communities in which whole-class…

Social reading is an interactive reading activity that activates readers to read and discuss through social annotation, facilitates the expression of diverse ideas, and promotes collaborative inquiry and knowledge building. Social reading is a common activity in higher education. However, discussions on how social annotation can be combined with…

No higher-order skill will be more important for pupils to develop in the twenty-first century than critical thinking. Schools should integrate it into their curricula, thereby allowing students to acquire new skills in preparation for a dynamic and rapidly changing labour market. Educators, psychologists, and philosophers agree on the importance…

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…

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…

Fractals describe many natural phenomena; their strong visual-figurative nature found its mathematical conceptualization in the concept of self-similarity. In the current study, we investigate how students construct (fully or partially) the self-similarity concept while recursively constructing the Sierpinski triangle, working in small group and…

This paper focuses on the factors that are likely to play a role in individual learning outcomes from group discussions, and it includes a comparison featuring test-enhanced learning. A between-groups design (N = 98) was used to examine the learning effects of feedback if provided to discussion groups, and to examine whether group discussions…

Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before…

The current research trend of metacognitive regulation has shifted from an individual to a social context. One such social context is collaborative problem-solving. Interaction between group members is an essential factor in completing collaborative problems. Metacognitive regulation is divided into four forms based on the interaction in…

This paper reports on a study aiming at examining whether online argumentation enhance the teacher candidates' scientific habits of mind (SHOM). The study was carried out as a pre-experimental design including pre and post-test. Scientific Habits of Mind scale, interviews and written arguments were used as data collection tools. Google Classroom,…

Based on the past sixteen years of experience with an online collaborative endeavor offered across differing university types, as well as modes of instruction, the best practice found that by fostering student peer exchanges on a collaborative web site students reached a high level of achievement in these courses. Findings indicate that despite…

This descriptive study focuses on using voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms to extract student speech data in order to better understand the collaboration of small group work and the impact of teaching assistant (TA) interventions in undergraduate engineering discussion sections. Audio data were recorded from individual students wearing…