Examining how classroom talk shapes students’ identities as reflexive writers in elementary classrooms

Teaching Secondary and Middle School Mathematics combines the latest developments in research, standards, and technology with a vibrant writing style to help teachers prepare for the excitement and challenges of teaching secondary and middle school mathematics today. In the fully revised fifth edition, scholar and mathematics educator Daniel Brahier invites teachers to investigate the nature of the mathematics curriculum and reflect on research-based "best practices" as they define and sharpen their own personal teaching styles. The fifth edition has been updated and expanded with a particular emphasis on the continued impact of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and NCTM’s just-released Principles to Actions, as well as increased attention to teaching with technology, classroom management, and differentiated instruction. Features include: A full new Chapter 7 on selection and use of specific tools and technology combined with "Spotlight on Technology" features throughout clearly illustrate the practical aspects of how technology can be used for teaching or professional development. Foundational Chapters 1 and 2 on the practices and principles of mathematics education have been revised to build directly on Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and Principles to Actions, with additional references to both documents throughout all chapters. A new Chapter 4 focuses on the use of standards in writing objectives and organizing lesson plan resources while an updated Chapter 5 details each step of the lesson planning process. A fully revised Chapter 12 provides new information on teaching diverse populations and outlines specific details and suggestions for classroom management for mathematics teachers. Classroom Dialogues" features draws on the author’s 35-year experience as an educator to present real-world teacher-student conversations about specific mathematical problems or ideas "How Would You React?" features prepares future teachers for real-life scenarios by engaging them in common classroom situations and offering tried-and-true solutions. With more than 60 practical, classroom-tested teaching ideas, sample lesson and activities, Teaching Secondary and Middle School Mathematics combines the best of theory and practice to provide clear descriptions of what it takes to be an effective teacher of mathematics.

Recognizing that empirical research into classroom dialogue has been conducted for about 40 years, a review is reported of 225 studies published between 1972 and 2011. The studies were identified through systematic search of electronic databases and scrutiny of publication reference lists. They focus on classroom dialogue in primary and secondary classrooms, covering the full age range of compulsory schooling. The methods of data collection and analysis used in the studies are described and discussed, with changes and continuities over time highlighted. Study results are then summarized and integrated to present a succinct picture of what is currently known and where future research might profitably be directed. One key message is that much more is known about how classroom dialogue is organized than about whether certain modes of organization are more beneficial than others. Moreover, epistemological and methodological change may be required if the situation is to be remedied.

Introduction. The article focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of academic writer identity. The theoretical aspect comprises the analysis of the Anglo-American bulk of research devoted to the problem of writer identity in the academic written discourse. The purpose of the article is to define the structure of writer identity, its voice and stance. The practical objectives of the study is to investigate the identity of novice academic writers represented in their language choices as well as to describe the mechanism of such choices. In order to accomplish the purpose of the research, three types of writer positioning are distinguished: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Materials and Methods. The theoretical analysis is based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and Rhetorical Genre Studies as well as recent developments of ESP. The analysis of empirical data has been conducted using the methods of discourse analysis as well as qualitative and quantitative methods of data processing. The study reveals the voice and stance represented by lexico-grammatical means of the English academic written discourse. The conducted experiment introduces the context of ESP and models the situation of the implementation of the genre approach in the Academic Writing course in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which is one of the leading technical universities in Russia. The research materials include texts of academic book reviews written in English by Russian undergraduates. Results. The study has revealed the social nature of writer identity determined by the genre hybridity of a book review. It is shown that identification and positioning are in direсt connection with the source text; thus, while choosing a textbook of a general science book, the writer identity is getting to be collective or professional. Depending on the functional style of the source text, the rhetorical markers are changing as well. Thus, while choosing a textbook, students are writing for the teacher and addresses the student audience; at the same time in case of the general science text, the student rises to the level of an expert and addresses the scientific community. The popular science text helps work out the individual voice while the author’s style is changing toward the creative one and the dialogue between the writer and the reader is taking an intimate coloring. Subjectivity markers (adjectives with the negative value, boosters) are getting to be typical for the Russian linguistic and academic culture. Conclusions. The article concludes that constructing the socially-predetermined writer identity is an essential skill for students and academics. The writer identity is fluid and changeable depending on the social context – academic discourse and genre characteristics. The genre of a book review that combines objectivity and subjectivity gives an opportunity to construct writer identity according to the choice of the source text. The writer identity is culturally-predetermined and connected with the standards of Russian linguistic culture, academic rules and traditions of teaching English as a foreign language in Russia.

Classroom dialogue is known to be linked to students’ learning outcomes. However, in the science education literature, there is no theoretical tool to characterise types of dialogues that specifically foster students’ disciplinary literacy and practices. Equipping science educators with a disciplinary coding scheme can enhance teachers’ competence in orchestrating productive classroom dialogue. Extending from the Toolkit for Systematic Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA), we constructed a SciT-SEDA that characterises domain-specific and domain-general dialogues through iterative analysis and examination of classroom data of four teachers, two of whom had received formal teacher training in science education while the other two had not. SciT-SEDA encompasses 20 dialogue categories that are distributed across 4 general themes regarding their functions in relation to dialogic space. We provide evidence that SciT-SEDA is sensitive in identifying differences between trained and untrained teachers. Hence, we propose that SciT-SEDA can be incorporated into teacher training programs that build science teachers’ competence in orchestrating classroom dialogue in promoting students’ disciplinary literacy and practices.

This paper explores how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) might be harnessed to support student learning through classroom dialogue. This powerful and increasingly prevalent technology opens up opportunities for learners to generate, modify, and evaluate new ideas, through multimodal interaction along with talk. Its use can thereby support rich new forms of dialogue that highlight differences between perspectives, and make ideas and reasoning processes more explicit. The emerging account builds upon Bahktin's conception of dialogue and Wegerif's notion of technology ‘opening up a dialogic space for reflection’, but foregrounds the role of mediating artefacts. Classroom dialogue in the context of IWB use is construed as being facilitated by teachers and learners constructing digitally represented knowledge artefacts together. These visible, dynamic, and constantly evolving resources constitute interim records of activity and act as supportive devices for learners' emerging thinking, rather than finished products of dialogue. This primarily theoretical account is illustrated with examples from case studies of UK classroom practice. Analysing lessons in sequence has illuminated how teachers can exploit the IWB through cumulative interaction with a succession of linked digital resources, and through archiving and revisiting earlier artefacts. The tool thereby helps to support the progression of dialogue over time, across settings and even across learner groups. In sum, the article reframes the notion of dialogue for this new context in which students are actively creating and directly manipulating digital artefacts, and offers some practical examples.

Recent national reforms focus on learning disciplinary core ideas through engaging in science and engineering practices. These reforms also call for students and teachers to use crosscutting concepts (CCCs), or analytical lenses, that support scientific sensemaking and connections across disciplines. The Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) posits that CCCs must be made explicit to provide students with access to scientific sensemaking processes. This study analyzes class dialogue during the implementation of an NGSS-aligned curricular unit that integrates science, engineering, and computational modeling for fifth-grade students. The analysis focuses on the implicit and explicit use of CCCs to support student learning. Findings show that although the CCC of systems and system models was the focus of the unit and professional development, systems appeared in the class dialogue much less frequently than other CCCs, and teachers used all of the CCCs at some point during the unit. With the exception of patterns, all references to CCCs were implicit within the classroom dialogue. This study provides evidence that the CCCs play an important part in classroom conversation that focuses on integrating disciplinary core ideas with science and engineering practices. This work has implications to help teachers, teacher educators, and researchers identify the set(s) of CCCs that may have the most explanatory value for particular DCIs anad SEPs, as well as highlights the need for professional learning experiences to promote explicit use of CCCs by teachers and students within classrooms.

Classroom dialogue is fundamental in a classroom guided by socio-constructivist views of learning due to the learning experiences teachers can provide their students through them. This descriptive and exploratory case study aims to analyse the discourse that enables teachers to facilitate students' expression of models through the study of a phenomenon in a science class. The case study presents the experiences of four secondary school chemistry teachers who implement the same teaching and learning sequence about chemical combinations. The classes were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using a qualitative research framework. The results show that teachers facilitate learning opportunities through intermittent spaces of productive classroom conversation. The analysis of these dialogical spaces lets us identify a highly distinctive dialogic process that permeates instructional modelling opportunities, which focus on four dimensions of the management of the modelling conversation: teachers' conversational directionality, the presence of non-productive classroom conversation, moments that trigger the teacher's discursive decisions and the construction of the model through instructional modelling cycles.

In UK schools, there remains a compartmentalisation of English into ‘language’ and ‘literature’, evident in the ways that the subject is taught and examined and in the degrees to which teachers perceive themselves as being either a ‘language’ or a ‘literature’ teacher. In this paper, we suggest that an approach informed by cognitive linguistics and cognitive stylistics offers a wealth of affordances to the teacher who wishes to integrate aspects of linguistic and literary studies into their teaching. We argue that, in particular, the cognitive discourse grammar Text World Theory provides an accessible and usable set of pedagogical principles, and present two case studies of collaborative research with teachers in which they drew upon Text World Theory as a model for thinking about grammar teaching, literature teaching, lesson design, classroom talk and their own identity as a teacher of English. The data suggests that this approach may have positive benefits for students engaging in high-level linguistic analysis and the developing of responses to literature, and for teachers thinking about lesson and activity design.

Guided by positioning theory and poststructural views of second language learning, the two descriptive case studies presented in this article explored the links between social positioning and the language learning experiences of two talkative students in an academic ESL classroom. Focusing on the macro- and micro-level contexts of communication, the article describes how one of the two talkative students became an accepted member of the class whereas the other one was excluded. Qualitative data and classroom talk were analyzed recursively. The findings suggest that social positioning has implications for developing useful classroom interactions that benefit all learners.

Poetry writing in the elementary classroom is an issue that is always challenging to both: students and teachers, because of the creative processes that have to be employed in order to get the final products. It takes time, and cannot be prompted without putting creative efforts of the teachers themselves. The aim of this paper is to answer several questions regarding teaching poetry writing in the classroom and the teaching methodology that need to be practiced in order to do good poetry writing practices with small children. The sample is purposive and is consisted of elementary classroom teachers that practice poetry writing activities with the students. In depth interviews are conducted with the sampled teachers in order to obtain the necessary data for analysis. Discussion about the results of the research is based on descriptive analytics, and on the qualitative descriptions. The results show that the teachers use variety of techniques for the purpose of motivating poetry writing in the classroom, which are presented in the discussion of the results.

This paper is a Work in Progress (WIP). Techniques of engagement and knowledge transfer in the world of engineering education are constantly evolving to meet higher academic expectations of students to solve problems beyond the classroom context. One such evolution is the introduction and utilization of the Maker culture into engineering curricula. Makers brand a modern culture encompassing, but not limited to students and entrepreneurs that are technology-driven toward the creation of physical objects or software to gain a better understanding of engineering properties, concepts, and practical problem-solving skills. This work in progress paper attempts to better understand how the Making culture has become interwoven into the fabric of engineering curricula, the effectiveness of Making as a pedagogical technique, and the influences Making-based pedagogy has on student learning. In investigating this pedagogical phenomenon, we utilize a case study approach of three mezzanine engineering courses at a large southwestern university. These courses were selected to reflect three distinct required subject areas that fall within the mezzanine. Our protocol included data collection to explore how each of the faculty members teaching the courses define what Making means to them and how it is utilized in their classroom. Our case study includes data collection through interviews, observations, and documents. A multiple case study analysis was conducted, with the unit of analysis being a single course. Preliminary analysis of the interview data reveals that faculty members have differing opinions of what Making is and how to most effectively apply it within their individual courses. Early results indicate that this is a positive finding, meaning that making can be instantiated in a classroom setting in a variety of ways. Evidence of Making in the engineering curricula is palpable and embeds aspects of engaged and active learning, “building” something to represent concepts as well as connecting to students’ interest. The paper will include a review of the literature that guides this work, an overview of the study design, insights from the data analysis, and a discussion of future work.

Over the past two decades, creativity has emerged as one of the core 21 st century learning objectives within K‐12 education systems around the world. While some literature has demonised assessment as something that inhibits creativity, a growing body of research supports feedback‐driven teaching — also known as formative assessment or assessment for learning —as an effective pedagogical approach across contexts and content areas. Given this empirical foundation, we propose that assessment for learning holds powerful potential for helping students to learn about being creative. To examine intersections of creativity and assessment in K‐12 educational contexts, we carried out the scoping review study reported here, with the aim of advancing understanding of how assessment can support and promote creativity in classroom contexts. Fifty‐one research articles were selected for review, based on inclusion criteria which required that articles (a) reported the collection and analysis of quantitative or qualitative data, (b) addressed K‐12 classroom or extra‐curricular contexts, (c) addressed the formative or summative assessment of creativity for pedagogical intent, (d) were peer‐reviewed, and (e) were published in English. Analysis of the research revealed two dominant and consistent themes. Firstly, multiple studies indicated the importance of defined criteria for effective and useful creativity assessment within K‐12 classroom contexts. Secondly, a number of studies identified the particular value of self‐assessment and/or reflection in supporting creativity. We discuss implications of these findings in relation to educational policies and practices that seek to promote creativity, and areas for future research.

The aim of this study is to investigate the types of teacher talk and their meanings in dealing with diverse students. This research aimed to explore several fundamental aspects that occurred in classroom interaction. They are: 1) the types of teacher talk; 2) the most dominant and least performed type of teacher talk; and 3) the contribution of teacher talk to supporting learning. This research was a case study with the participation of three English teachers. The data had been collected through classroom observation, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires. In examining the utterances uttered by all teachers, video recordings were utilised throughout the learning process. The result of the video transcription was then analysed using Moskowitz’s FLINT system to categorise the type of teacher talk. The result was then cross-checked with the interview and questionnaire to support the validity of the data. The study's findings demonstrated that during the teaching and learning process, teachers used nearly every kind of teacher discourse. Joking was the least frequent sort of speech, while asking questions was the most frequent. Through their utterances during the session, the teacher also provided support to the students who transferred from situations where English was not their first or second language. Teachers facing comparable situations may find it helpful to consider the study's implications and outcomes while trying to boost student engagement, which in turn encourages students to participate more actively in the learning process. Keywords: Exploration; classroom interaction; teachers’ talk;

In the realm of Mathematics education, the use of dialogue and argumentation as pedagogical approach has gained significant attention in recent years. Research shows that the views of the teachers in the use of dialogue and argumentation teaching approach play a crucial role in shaping the learning experience for students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the views of teachers towards use of dialogue and argumentation in the Mathematics classroom. The study employed a quantitative approach that used structured questionnaire for data collection from a sample of 100 Mathematics teachers selected from 72 secondary schools in Gutu district of Masvingo Province in Zimbabwe using a judgemental or purposive (non-probability) sampling strategy. Two statistical metrics namely the mean and the standard deviation were used for data analysis. Results of the study show that there is a general agreement among teachers that dialogue and argumentation is an effective approach to the teaching Ordinary level Mathematics. The main study limitation is that it only used a quantitative approach, which may have affected the depth and breadth of data collected about the views of teachers towards use of dialogue and argumentation in the mathematics classroom. The results of this study have implications on both practice and policy about the views of teachers towards use of dialogue and argumentation in the Mathematics classroom.

This chapter develops the concept of ‘deliberative dialogue’ to explore crucial characteristics of mathematics classroom practice, in which the promotion of social participation is an explicit aim. It presents two case studies: one on future teachers facing deliberate dialogues, another on on-line deliberate dialogue in a secondary school mathematics classroom. It concludes that more pre-service and in-service teachers should be involved in design-based research activities that seek to facilitate participation and deliberate dialogue in mathematics classrooms.