Students gravitate toward philosophy. As a 10th grade philosophy teacher, I once had a student ask for detention so we could continue a discussion about Plato and Aristotle without tarnishing his reputation as a respected gang member. That request revealed the paradox of teaching philosophy in K-12 classrooms: Many find it an unsuitably difficult…

The analysis of exemplars is a potentially powerful way of acquainting students with academic standards and supporting their capacities to make informed academic judgements. This paper investigates the role of dialogue in supporting students to develop their appreciation of the nature of quality work. The research derives from a project involving…

This study explores the tools and techniques used within the library instruction classroom to facilitate a conversation about teaching practices. Researchers focused on the questioning methods employed by librarians, specifically the number of questions asked by librarians and students. This study was comprised of classroom observations of a team…

In this essay, the author asserts that the dialogic pedagogy of Paulo Freire provides a good description of the dynamic of authentic learning. The author narrates one short example and one long example of Freirian dialogues occurring in a public high school, giving details that describe moments of transformation. The short narrative sketches…

Classroom learning is a shared experience where ideas and concepts are shaped by the interactions between students and teachers. Different cultural backgrounds of the students compared to the teacher can increase misconceptions or confusion. Although the effective teacher may plan for a range of questions to promote classroom discussion, the more…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015), which replaced the federal government's education policy called the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002), takes full effect in the 2017-2018 school year with renewed focus on accountability systems established by each state. States must have for their middle schools rigorous accountability systems in…

Code-switching is related to the shift between the first and second languages done by the speakers in conversational contexts. Based on the theories of code-switching, second language learners frequently apply their first language when communicating with others to deliver the messages clearly, maintain group solidarity, and avoid unintended…

A great deal of research undertaken in child language development, neurolinguistics and various branches of functional and cognitive linguistics has shown that a main source of language development is the spoken input to which learners are exposed. Despite the fact that for most adult L2 learners, the greatest exposure to the L2 is the input they…

How do language instructors fulfill institutional mandates while also nurturing students' interest? What becomes of this process when it unfolds not in one class meeting but in a series of pedagogical events? Classroom research has suggested the importance of integrating authentic, conversational, and rapport-building talk with instructional…

This study seeks to understand the emotional connection of teachers' academically productive talk (APT) with student learning from the students' perspective. Using a sample of 2,225 students (N[subscript 7th grade] = 1,146 and N[subscript 8th grade] = 1,079) from 16 middle schools in a city of China, we investigate the relationship between…

We examined the language and reading progress of 336 young DHH children in kindergarten, first and second grades. Trained assessors tested children's language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled phonological awareness in the fall and spring of the school year. Children were divided into groups based on their auditory access and classroom…

Supporting students' engagement in meaningful mathematics discussions can be challenging. It involves, for example, choosing tasks that are worth discussing (e.g., Stein and Lane 1996), negotiating norms for how students engage with one another's ideas (Kazemi and Stipek 2001; Horn 2012), eliciting students' thinking, and pressing students to…

While there is a growing research interest in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) teaching and learning in university contexts, relatively limited attention has been paid to EMI teacher development. Drawing on my past and ongoing teaching and research practice as an EMI teacher educator, this Viewpoint article considers the emotional,…

We analyse data collected at multilingual schools in Catalonia, taking a plurilingual and socio-cultural Conversation Analysis approach to the interactions studied. The analytical sections of the article show how plurilingual practices are resources for students' participation in classroom activities; we argue that language learning is a process…

The endorsement of anti-corruption norms is a normative assumption in legal systems with freedom of information acts, where citizens are expected to act as monitors of the public service. Tolerance of corruption counteracts this assumption. We studied tolerance of corruption among 8th graders from Latin-American samples of the International Civic…