This Teaching Tips describes a yearlong process of facilitating meaningful discussion groups about literature with first-grade students in an urban Title I school. At the beginning of the year, the teacher provided explicit instruction in speaking and listening skills to support students with the social skills needed for thoughtful discussion. She…

An inner-city second grade teacher-researcher and her university-based partner examine how she and her inner-city second graders learned to resist and expand the constraints of their mandated, scripted reading curriculum by exploring their neighborhood and classrooms as communities spaces for literacies learning. Drawing on an interactional…