Teaching that is responsive to students' ideas can create opportunities for rigorous sense-making talk by young learners. Yet we have few accounts of how thoughtful attempts at responsive teaching unfold across units of instruction in elementary science classrooms and have only begun to understand how responsiveness encourages rigor in…

This article draws on data from an action research project carried out in a lower secondary school environment in the Czech Republic. The project involved the implementation of a teacher professional development programme aimed at transforming teacher-student communication and reinforcing opportunities for student participation in classroom…

Through the use of a case study, this article explores the role of talk in underprepared students' acquisition of academic discourse. Conversation analysis as a linguistic framework is used to examine the interactions of students participating in a small writing group. Tracing the progress of one student's paper, I explore how students'…

Anne Haas Dyson's concept of the "child collective" and Colette Daiute's concept of "youth genres" can be useful observational frameworks for better understanding classroom dynamics. In studying classrooms where children are given opportunities to collaborate, Dyson's "child collective" identifies those behaviors that…

Many instructors are planning to teach their writing classes in the networked computer classroom. Through the use of electronic mail, course listservs, and chat programs, the instructor is offered the opportunity to facilitate a more egalitarian classroom discourse that creates a strong sense of community, not only between students, but also…