Research on personal epistemologies (Hofer & Pintrich, 2002) has mostly conceptualized them as stable beliefs or stages of development. On these views, researchers characterize individual students' epistemologies with single, coherent descriptions. Evidence of variability in student epistemologies, however, suggests the need for more complex…

The author shares a teaching method that promotes student engagement and involvement in class reading and discussion.

This article presents the results of research about students' and teachers' use of an interaction framework (THINK) to guide group communication about problem solving. Students who used the THINK framework demonstrated greater gains in problem-solving achievement than students who did not use the framework.

Instructional settings are developed for conceptual understanding of measurement for the fourth-grade students to engage limited English proficient (LEP) students in effectively communicating about mathematics. When naturally enticed to compare solutions, the students were motivated to explain their mathematical thinking and understand the…

This study investigated student engagement in class discussions in a university-level, literature-based writing class. The research questions were 1) Does multiple-source learning provide a new lens for the observation of reflective teaching and learning practices? 2) Is there evidence that shows that the practices adopted by one teacher actually…

Each semester, Julia G. Brooks writes "silence=agreement" on the board during a discussion of socialization in her Introductory Sociology classes, and invites students to discuss their initial responses to this statement. Inevitably, there are students who agree with the statement outright, claiming "If people have something to say…

Classroom talk is an example of institutional discourse, based on asymmetrical distribution of communicative rights and obligations between teachers and students. Teachers hold power and solidarity relationships with their students. It has been assumed that, in general, women are more concerned with solidarity while men are more interested in…

Bakhtin's language theories give educators a view into how people develop and communicate with language through dialogue. These conceptions can be applied to teaching in a variety of positive ways. The authors explore how teaching based on Bakhtinian concepts might function in the classroom, paying particular attention to the concepts of dialogue,…

The Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development has been interpreted in such a way as to provide theoretical support for particular, Government-sponsored, models of both pedagogy and literacy. This article proposes a radically different interpretation of the ZPD, informed by Bakhtinian understandings of heteroglossia. This alternative…

In an attempt to uncover differences in student behavior as a function of class size, the author observed a small class and a large class for 15 hours each and conducted interviews with eight students who were members of both classes. Two trends emerged from these qualitative data. First, a "diverge-converge" pattern was evident in the small class…

This study investigates the orientation of language-use practices during in-class peer work of second-year college learners of German in three different sections (classes) of a multi-section course, taught by three different teachers at a public American Midwestern research university. Qualitative analyses of recordings made over the course of an…

This paper illustrates how classroom discourse demands a multi-layered analysis. The first analysis focuses on classroom discourse and provides a picture of pupil participation in teacher-pupil interactions: who is inducted into discourse and who is not. However, this local micro-analysis does not afford interpretation at the level of the…

A model for processes of abstraction, based on epistemic actions, has been proposed elsewhere. Here we apply this model to processes in which groups of individual students construct shared knowledge and consolidate it. The data emphasizes the interactive flow of knowledge from one student to the others in the group, until they reach a shared…

This article details what happened when, after endless hours of teaching and explaining how literature circles work, the authors were dismayed at how their students still struggled to have positive social interactions during book discussions. Book discussions often deteriorated into tension filled discussions marred by class inequities, bullying,…

Drawing on extant theorizing and research on reflective teaching, this paper discusses the impact of an innovative methods course designed around the activity of student teachers' reflections on their own classroom discourse, for their understandings of the connections between theory and practice. Situated in the context of foreign language…