Growing Student Knowing Through Morning Meeting Talk

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Middle Elementary Students Constructing Literate Understandings Within and Beyond Instruction

Abstract

This paper explicates how one teacher purposefully and contingently harnesses the literacy event of the daily Morning Meeting in a mainstream third grade classroom to position students as primary knowers who shape the scope and substance of classroom talk. Classroom discourse analysis shows how teacher instantiated patterns of talk open up discourse space for exploration and varied opinions, and how student purposes, judgments and contributions are woven into real time instructional decision-making and talk.
This paper is grounded in the notion that a dialogic approach is more effective than a traditional monologic approach as it better supports students’ growing understanding, critical thinking, and retention (Renshaw, 2004; Wells, 2001). A dialogic instructional stance is evident through both literacy event planning (such as purposeful decisions about how content is presented and discussed), and patterns of instructional delivery.
After extended entrée, data were collected during the last month of the academic year when the classroom culture was firmly established. Focus is on eleven Morning Meetings (ranging from 20 to 55 minutes) and main source of data for this discourse analysis is transcripts.
Close discourse analysis of patterns of teacher and student talk in context: participant roles (Almasi, 1996); oral language techniques (Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999); questioning frameworks (Author, 2006; Cazden, 2001); exploratory talk (Barnes, 2008; Barnes, Britton, & Torbe, 1969) facilitated by NVIVO qualitative software to comprehensively and systematically retrieve codings supported explication of local discourse conditions. Patterns within and across lessons were identified and graphically presented to better understand the roles of teacher and student talk in relation to exploratory and elaborated talk, reasoning and intertextuality.
Findings reveal how the planned structure of Morning Meeting explicitly connects home and school. Further, the Reading Log component ensures 1) all students have focal time, 2) student selected, independently read texts provide springboards for large group conversation and 3) Michael opportunity to stimulate exploration and elaboration, eliciting intertextual connections and providing opportunity to creatively appropriate school language. For example, Michael’s responses to one student’s comment about a character living at an orphanage, initiated a seven-minute conversation involving 14 students, and opened up an intertextual discussion about many authors’ stereotypical treatment of orphanages as a common setting and considered how it impacts character development, and the readers’ predisposition towards characters. While this example is particularly collaborative, it illustrates how the local conditions for classroom talk were such that there was no “script”. Rather we see the teacher working in the moment to signal to his students that he is listening and that their ideas are important as he strategically anchors his questions and comments in their contributions, aligning illocutionary force and educational purpose.
Critical to findings is that Michael’s students respond to his dialogical stance (not specific discourse structures). This is evident through the many elaborated, authoritative and substantive student responses following, for example, surface recitative questions.
This study provides an illustrative case of how supportive and substantive opportunities for engaged student talk with content are enacted in the classroom.

Authors

• Maureen P. Boyd, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Bill Markarian, University at Buffalo - SUNY