Classroom discussion practices that can lead to reasoned participation by all students are presented and described by the authors. Their research emphasizes the careful orchestration of talk and tasks in academic learning. Parallels are drawn to the philosophical work on deliberative discourse and the fundamental goal of equipping all students to participate in academically productive talk. These practices, termed Accountable Talk SM , emphasize the forms and norms of discourse that support and promote equity and access to rigorous academic learning. They have been shown to result in academic achievement for diverse populations of students. The authors outline Accountable Talk as encompassing three broad dimensions: one, accountability to the learning community, in which participants listen to and build their contributions in response to those of others; two, accountability to accepted standards of reasoning, talk that emphasizes logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions; and, three, accountability to knowledge, talk that is based explicitly on facts, written texts, or other public information. With more than fifteen years research into Accountable Talk applications across a wide range of classrooms and grade levels, the authors detail the challenges and limitations of contexts in which discourse norms are not shared by all members of the classroom community.

A discourse-oriented classroom activity in an ethnically mixed, first grade classroom is studied from an interpretive perspective, integrating ethnographic observation and fine-grained conversational analysis. “Sharing time” is a recurring activity where children are called upon to describe an object or give a narrative account about some past event to the entire class. The teacher, through her questions and comments, tries to help the children structure and focus their discourse. This kind of activity serves to bridge the gap between the child's home-based oral discourse competence and the acquisition of literate discourse features required in written communication.Through a detailed characterization of the children's sharing styles, evidence is provided suggesting that children from different backgrounds come to school with different narrative strategies and prosodic conventions for giving narrative accounts. When the child's discourse style matches the teacher's own literate style and expectations, collaboration is rhythmically synchronized and allows for informal practice and instruction in the development of a literate discourse style. For these children, sharing time can be seen as a kind of oral preparation for literacy. In contrast, when the child's narrative style is at variance with the teacher's expectations, collaboration is often unsuccessful and, over time, may adversely affect school performance and evaluation. Sharing time, then, can either provide or deny access to key literacy-related experiences, depending, ironically, on the degree to which teacher and child start out “sharing” a set of discourse conventions and interpretive strategies. (Urban communication, ethnic/subcultural differences in discourse style, the transition to literacy, American English.)

I t is now widely accepted that certain kinds of well-structured talk, whether teacher guided or student directed, promote academic learning. Productive classroom talk-in all subject areas, at all grade levels-has been recognized by major U.S. teaching organizations (e.g., the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Science Teachers Association), and all major National Research Council consensus documents, and finds explicit support in the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. All of the chapters in this volume, each in its own way, reinforce and extend this claim. But simply knowing that productive talk is important, and encouraging or mandating that teachers engage their students in evidence-based discussion and argument, is not enough to ensure that it happens. For many years, researchers and teacher educators have tackled the challenge of helping teachers at all stages develop skills in facilitating discussion so that it is the students who do the heavy lifting in terms of explaining, justifying claims with evidence, and critiquing and improving ideas in concert with peers. We have learned a great deal about effective professional development for teachers on productive discussion over the past two decades (

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“Revoicing” by teachers in classroom group conversations creates participant frameworks that facilitate students' “alignment” with academic tasks and their socialization to roles and identities in intellectual discourse. Three examples demonstrate the potential of “revoicing” to: (1) position students in differing alignments with propositions and allow them to claim or disclaim ownership of their position; (2) share reformulations in ways that credit students with teachers' warranted inferences; (3) scaffold and recast problem‐solution strategies of non‐native‐language students.