Inquiry is a promising avenue for providing intellectually rich, meaningful instruction, particularly for elementary social studies. Social studies is an interdisciplinary school subject that demands the interplay of content and skills that can be explicitly taught and demonstrated through inquiry. However, the inquiry approach is challenging in…

This study examined the moment-by-moment reciprocal relationships between teachers' instructional moves and students' social reasoning during collaborative small-group discussions. Social reasoning refers to students' justification of knowledge and understanding of complex issues from the social world. Participants included 131 fifth-grade…

This study examined how a middle school mathematics teacher implemented formative assessment lessons and how the classroom gradually transformed into an environment that encourages students' participation in mathematical discourse practices. Data were collected through year-long observations of a seventh-grade mathematics classroom and interviews.…

Forums are essential components facilitating interactions in online courses. However, in large-scale courses, many posts generated, which results in learners' difficulties. First, the posts are poorly organized and some deviate from the topic, making it difficult for learners' knowledge acquisition. Second, learners cannot receive timely feedback…

Over the past 20 years, a broad and diverse research literature has emerged to address how students learn to argue through dialogue in educational contexts. However, the variety of approaches used to study this phenomenon makes it challenging to find coherence in what may otherwise seem to be disparate fields of study. In this integrative review,…

From the socio-critical perspective of mathematical modeling, reflexive discussions about the nature, criteria, and consequences of mathematical models are not a natural consequence of modeling in school. This report is part of a larger study focused on stimulating reflexive discussions in practice employing constructivist grounded theory as a…

A key goal of recent reforms in science education has been to support students' collective sensemaking, in which they work together to understand a natural phenomenon. This work is often done during class discussions, but facilitating those discussions is challenging. In this study, we used a framework of three discussion types to investigate how…

In recognition of the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic pronounced racialized and ethnicized inequities, five educators and community activists from across the United States gathered to reflect on the ways Black and Brown communities have developed community cultural wealth in the time of COVID-19. The authors gathered on Zoom to share their…

Education professionals face myriad problems of practice, especially in the face of current trauma, injustice, and other stressors. To address those challenges, educators should work collaboratively to target the sources, not just the symptoms, of the problems. Asking why can begin to surface root causes, which may be related to systems,…

A central component of online learning, asynchronous discussions have the potential to impact distance learners in myriad ways positively. For a discussion to be most impactful, best practices associated with online discussion should be implemented, yet discernment regarding such practices too often remains elusive or unimplemented. This study…

This study examined how background knowledge activation impacted reading comprehension. Comparisons were made between discussion-based background knowledge activation, paired informational text background knowledge activation, and a control group. One-way ANOVAs discovered significant differences between the discussion group and the control group…

This article dives into the complexity of managing our "self" and our "roles," and how we can acknowledge the vast multitudes contained in each of our identities in our work as leadership educators. We wanted to incorporate a more conversational format to this article by highlighting the different ways ideas can be expressed…

Only by pushing through resistance can coaches help teams achieve necessary change, write Candice Bocala and RoLesia Holman. Head of the RIDES Project at Harvard, the authors describe how both technical fixes and adaptive solutions can help coaches elicit deeper, more meaningful discussions with staff about race.

Background: It has repeatedly been reported that, when making decisions under uncertainty, groups outperform individuals. Real groups are often replaced by simulated groups: Instead of performing an actual group discussion, individual responses are aggregated by a numerical computation. While studies have typically used unweighted majority voting…

Classroom discussions have become a centerpiece of reform efforts in science education because talk mediates the joint co-constructing of knowledge in science classrooms. Although decades of research underscore the importance of talk in supporting science learning, the science education community continues to grapple with how to support teachers…