Raising the Bar With the Third Turn: Discourse Tools That Encourage the Expansion of Student Reasoning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Despite national initiatives, like Common Core, that promote public reasoning and call for students to externalize their thinking, discourse in many US classrooms consists of students briefly responding to teacher queries, and teachers evaluating students’ ideas as correct or incorrect, i.e., Initiation-Response-Evaluation, neither of which builds reasoning or collaborative knowledge building. In this symposium, we explore skilled teachers’ use of specific discursive tools to shift from recitation to reasoning. We focus on the third turn in the Teacher-Student-Teacher exchange, because it is in this turn that teachers sow the seeds to expand students’ reasoning. We examine three cases in which skilled teachers use particular talk moves in the third turn to engage students in reasoning and move discourse beyond I-R-E.

Sub Unit

• Division C - Learning and Instruction / Section 1a: Literacy

Chair

• Evelyn Ford-Connors, Boston University

Papers

• Putting Students in a Position to Elaborate: Powerful Talk About Texts in Individual Conferences and Small Groups - Dot McElhone, Portland State University

• Analyzing Teachers’ Vocabulary Instruction: The Power of the Third Turn in Teachers’ Talk - Evelyn Ford-Connors, Boston University; Catherine O'Connor, Boston University

• Who Thinks They Can Put That in Their Own Words? Using the Third Turn to Build a Classroom Culture of Listening - Sarah Michaels, Clark University; Julie Dwyer, Boston University; Cindy Bourgelas, Woodland Academy