This article is an inquiry into how talking is used for learning. The focus is on utterances of significance where participants say something which brings some sense of surprise and cognitive dissonance, and the purpose is to develop an understanding of how such 'shaking utterances' contribute to learning. The study is conducted from a social…

This study examined how teachers read cases in a professional development academy for reading teachers. It drew on reading theory, particularly Tierney and Pearson's (1981) work on "text-based" and "reader-based" readings of traditional print-based text, to analyze conversations about cases where a specific focus on pedagogical…

Research on emotions illustrates a range of emotions that students and teachers experience, both individually and as a collective, in science learning settings. However, not as much attention has been given to how opportunities for emotional expressions are framed. Since emotions and their expressions are embedded in the discourse in which they…

Collaborative group work has been recognized as a way of fostering the development of metacognition and self-regulation. Moreover, it has been claimed that these regulatory processes have an interpersonal level in which the regulation of the activity is shared with others (Iiskala et al., 2004). There has also been a considerable body of research…

Quality classrooms provide opportunities for students of all different abilities and backgrounds to learn. Designing interaction to be participatory, deliberative, and active empowers students to have more control of their own learning and enables educators to be adaptive and responsive. Quality classrooms that foster democratic values, risk…

This dissertation addresses a problem of practice stemming from the lack of engagement students exhibit for reading social justice texts. Students today are in more culturally and socially diverse classrooms; their curriculum needs to reflect these social changes. A review of the problem of practice led to the first research question: Does…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide teachers with research and methodological findings for planning, facilitating and assessing classroom discussions around difficult, political issues. Design/methodology/approach: This paper focuses on navigating political polarization in classroom discussions. The research supported three teaching…

Student incivilities such as challenging, dissent, and excuse making have been examined by a variety of disciplines. However, the more encompassing idea of student misbehaviors has been somewhat understudied within instructional communication. The current study inductively arrived at a set of 12 distinct college student misbehaviors identified by…

Prompt strategies have been used to increase the compliance of preschool-aged children to teacher directives. This paper describes two experiments conducted to determine if classroom teachers could learn to use the LtM prompt hierarchy and if child compliance would increase in response to teacher behavior. This study builds on the current…

In a majority of cases observed in classrooms over the last several decades, what has gone by the name "discussion" is not discussion, but rather an interaction better known as recitation. If one sees this phenomenon as a problem, then an aspect of its resolution must be theoretical (as opposed to empirical or pedagogical): What series…

Background: Integration of engineering into middle school science and mathematics classrooms is a key aspect of STEM integration. However, successful pedagogies for teachers to use engineering talk in their classrooms are not fully understood. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study aims to address this need with the research question: How does a middle…

How better can we prepare students for the roles awaiting them as citizens than by engaging them in addressing challenging issues of the day? We describe our experience as a researcher--practitioner partnership with this objective in a yearlong program involving academically low-performing urban middle schoolers and a student-centered…

This article introduces Peer Review Circles (PRC), a classroom task that fully engages learners in the peer review process. The authors had observed their undergraduate students were reluctant to do peer review and even more reluctant to use the comments received. To improve the peer review process, the authors decided to change it into a…

Mathematical reasoning requires perseverance to overcome the cognitive and affective difficulties encountered whilst pursuing a reasoned line of enquiry. The aims of the study were: to understand how children's perseverance in mathematical reasoning (PiMR) manifests in reasoning activities, and to examine how PiMR can be facilitated through a…

This study set out to assess a new instrument designed to measure the perceived frequency that teachers use fear appeals (communicated value messages that focus on avoiding failure) prior to a high-stakes examination and their appraisal as a challenge or a threat. Data were collected from two samples of students preparing for their high-stakes…