Background/Context There are few examples from classrooms or the literature that provide a clear vision of teaching that simultaneously promotes rigorous disciplinary activity and is responsive to all students. Maintaining rigorous and equitable classroom discourse is a worthy goal, yet there is no clear consensus of how this actually works in a classroom. Focus of Study What does highly rigorous and responsive talk sound like and how is this dialogue embedded in the social practices and activities of classrooms? Our aim was to examine student and teacher interactions in classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) and contribute to a growing body of research that specifies equity in classroom practice. Research Design This mixed-method study examines differences in discourse within and across classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) that elevated, or failed to elevate, students’ explanatory rigor in equitable ways. Data include 222 secondary science lessons (1,174 episodes) from 37 novice teachers. Lessons were videotaped and analyzed for the depth of students’ explanatory talk and the quality of responsive dialogue. Findings The findings support three statistical claims. First, high levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students’ ideas or puzzlements. Second, the architecture of a lesson matters. Teachers and students engaging in highly rigorous and responsive lessons turned potentially trivial episodes (such as warm-ups) of science activity into robust learning experiences, connected to other episodes in the same lesson. Third, episodes featuring one or more forms of responsive talk elevated rigor. There were three forms of responsive talk observed in classrooms: building on students’ science ideas, attending to students’ participation in the learning community, and folding in students’ lived experiences. Small but strategic moves within these forms were consequential for supporting rigor. Conclusions/Recommendations This paper challenges the notion that rigor and responsiveness are attributes of curricula or individual teachers. Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences; the interactions within the classroom are essential for sustaining the highest quality of scientific practice and sense-making. The data supported the development of a framework that articulates incremental differences in supporting students’ explanatory rigor and three dimensions of responsiveness. We describe implications for using this framework in the design of teacher programs and professional development models.

Support for new forms of teaching expertise with rigorous and equitable outcomes for student learning is a particular challenge when communities of actors working together do not share a similar language or vision of teaching practice. For this project, we coordinated activities in and outside of secondary science classrooms for cooperating teachers (CTs) and their preservice teachers (PSTs) to inquire into a set of research-based teaching practices and tools. Using frame analysis, we contrast three problems-of-practice addressed by 23 dyads: problems of developing novice teachers, problems of improving teaching, and problems of improving student learning. The last frame, improving student learning, required actors to share and co-create knowledge with members outside of their dyads. To do this, groups of dyads formed new or repurposed existing social networks to share tools and work on problems "without ceilings," meaning those that fueled ongoing lines of inquiry. We describe ways in which knowledge became shared, actors assumed new roles, and new types of tools, activities, and forms of discourse emerged for contextualizing collective work. This study suggests a need for a systems-level approach to teacher education that focuses on institutional networks of shared tools, practices, and deliberate socioprofessional routines for improving practice.

The accuracy of comprehension monitoring affects the effectiveness of rereading, which in turn affects comprehension. Thus, much research has focused on finding ways to improve monitoring accuracy. The cue-utilization framework of metacognitive monitoring provides a framework for understanding how to improve monitoring accuracy. It suggests that accuracy is driven by cues people use to judge comprehension. When people utilize cues that are highly diagnostic of performance on a test of comprehension, accuracy should improve. Many interventions that have been shown to improve monitoring accuracy have attributed the improved accuracy to increased access to highly diagnostic cues, but have failed to identify highly diagnostic cues. In our recent research, we found that instructing students to generate drawings before judging comprehension improved monitoring accuracy. Using graphic analyses protocol, we identified highly diagnostic cues. In this chapter, we will describe the procedure we used to identify these cues contained in drawings.

To organize for the improvement of science instruction teachers need opportunities to collaboratively learn from practice, in practice, and to engage in the revision of classroom tools. In this paper, we examine how a professional learning community (PLC), comprised of middle school teachers and researchers, worked on the improvement of Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) practices and developed instructional practices and tools supporting model‐based inquiry. This paper focuses on the first year of a 5‐year research–practice partnership in which teachers and researchers routinely coplanned, cotaught, and codebriefed science lessons via improvement cycles. We conducted an analysis of teacher‐designed tools, reflective talk, and classroom observations. All teachers engaged in increasingly sophisticated forms of AST practices over the year and began to use a similar tool to scaffold scientific modeling with students. Yet, there were two distinct variations that evolved with grade‐level teams. One team developed a practice and tool supporting students’ final form articulation of ideas with models and the other team developed a practice and tools supporting the revision of models over a unit of instruction. We argue that both grade‐level teams engaged in productive learning and that PLC benefited from having different perspectives on relatively similar practices for scaffolding students’ scientific modeling. On the basis of the findings, we propose three key components to a practice‐based theory for how PLCs negotiate tools as a part of the improvement of teaching practices: anchoring improvement in a particular tool and practice, supporting variation in teacher learning and making teachers’ pedagogical reasoning explicit.

Rigorous and responsive science teaching is based on supporting all students in making progress in their understanding of important science ideas over time. In this article, we explore how did classroom talk patterns of funneling and focusing support student sensemaking. We share how talk, tasks, and tools within classroom activity work together to either funnel students toward reproducing normative scientific answers or focus students on deepening their understanding about unobservable causal mechanisms of phenomena. We use classroom examples from two science lessons where students used data to describe and communicate about how and why stars change over time. By recognizing these funneling and focusing patterns in classroom activity, teachers can attend to and modify the talk, tasks, and tools to improve and support opportunities for students’ sensemaking about important science ideas while they make progress on revising their own ideas over time.