What types of talk promote teachers' professional growth? In the following vignettes, 4th-grade teachers and instructional leaders examine student work and observe classroom instruction. These learning designs encourage teachers to talk in ways that develop a shared understanding of teaching, which is instrumental to their professional growth…

Student construction of models is a strong focus of current research and practice in science education. In order to study in detail the interactions between students' model generation and evaluation and their development of explanatory ideas to account for magnetic phenomena, a multi-session teaching experiment was conducted with a small number of…

In this qualitative case study, we examine the texture of talk in the booktalks of a fifth-grade classroom where authentic classroom discussions were common. The discourse analysis of classroom transcripts yielded 13 overlapping move categories describing the talk of the teacher, and nine the talk of the students. A comparison between authentic…

In this article, the authors show how groups of 2nd- and 4th-grade students in an urban school district responded to a postmodern children's book, The "Three Pigs" by David Wiesner (2001). The students came to the project from basal-based direct instruction, and here they were offered a more constructivist opportunity to engage with a…

Students may excel in computation, but their ability to apply their skills will suffer if they do not understand the math vocabulary used in instructions and story problems. This action research project examines two methods for strengthening students' ability to communicate mathematically: (1) Journal writing and peer discussion; and (2) The…

Enabling learning through meaningful classroom experiences has always been a challenge for teachers. Bringing about a balance of the "conceptual" and the "hands-on", along with contextual embeddedness in problem-solving situations, broadly characterises the experience of development and trials of three Design and Technology…