Literature discussion groups are a widely used practice in many classrooms. Creating literature discussions that are both effective and engaging can be a rewarding experience for both the students and the teacher. As a part of a larger study examining the scaffolding that took place during literature discussions, this article focuses on the…

Increasingly, studies are investigating the factors that influence student discourse in science courses, and specifically the mechanisms and discourse processes within small groups, to better understand the learning that takes place as students work together. This paper contributes to a growing body of research by analyzing how students engage in…

We discuss the utility of a coding system designed to evaluate the amount and type of parent talk during individualized family service plan (IFSP) meetings. The iterative processes used to develop the "Parent Communication Coding System" (PCCS) and its associated codes are described. In addition, we explored whether PCCS codes could be…

This paper considers the "policy work" of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the "problem of meaning" and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get "enacted". It argues that "policy work" is made up of a set of complex and…

Built from data collected through three-phase in-depth interviews, this study explores from cultural and social perspectives why Chinese students may initially be termed silent participants when they first commence group work with western students; and then examines the impact of cultural interaction through group work on their adjustment.…

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers' work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were…

This study provides a theory-driven account of community building in a bilingual telecollaborative chat setting. A symmetrical arrangement of 70 L1 English learners of Spanish and L1 Spanish learners of English engaged in weekly Internet chat sessions in small groups. The learning metaphors of community and participation serve as the theoretical…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…

In this research note we explore how children construct their identity in the context of a literacy practice: developing written and audio-visual texts in small-group situation to be published on the Internet. Through their dialogue, a shared identity is growing on the context, and every children create an identity as member of a community in…