Students love to talk. So do teachers. When there's a balance in the classroom between student and teacher discourse, good things happen. When students assume increased responsibility for discussions, when they interact with a wide range of peers on diverse topics and supply evidence for their thinking, great things happen. Noted educators Fisher and Frey discuss three reasons why productive student talk is essential to teaching and learning--and six ways teachers can promote meaningful talk in the classroom: (1) Offer meaningful and complex tasks; (2) model behavioral cues; (3) encourage argumentation, not arguing; (4) provide language support; (5) find the right group size; and (6) listen, question, prompt, and cue.