Conceptualizing Talk Moves as Tools:
Leveraging Professional Development Work with Teachers to Advance Empirical Studies of Academically Productive Talk
Productive classroom talk as a mechanism to promote learning — in all subject areas, at all grade levels — is growing in importance, within the United States and internationally. Research over the past 15 years suggests that well-structured discussion practices can result in robust gains in academic achievement for students from a range of socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds. Moreover, there are a small number of carefully controlled, large-scale studies that show that well-structured talk actually "builds the mind," with achievement gains transferring to other domains, and persisting over years. But most teachers in the US have a very hard time orchestrating discussions that are academically productive. In this presentation (developed with Cathy O'Connor, from Boston University), Michaels reports on some recent work and new PD resources for teachers, helping them develop their skill at orchestrating productive talk. By conceptualizing talk moves as tools, and using video in very specific ways, it is possible to introduce teachers (at scale) to new discussion practices that can serve a range of interactional, socializing, and intellectual functions in ELA, mathematics, and science classrooms. She outlines some of the theoretical, empirical, and applied advances in recent work on classroom discussion, as well as challenges that lie ahead for making productive classroom talk available to all students.
