Answer-Givers Versus Explanation-Builders: What Elementary Teachers Do to Foster Rigorous and Epistemically Rich Discourse

• In Event: Following the Thread From Planning to High-Quality Discourse About Science

Abstract

Elementary science instruction is frequently based on activities used to motivate young learners without involving them in intellectual work and on whole class “discussions” where the teacher explains science ideas to the class (Roth, 2014; Trygstad, 2013). We report on a year-long study of five upper elementary teachers who were coached to integrate more rigorous science talk into their lessons. Teachers observed modeling of talk by the coach who demonstrated how students’ ideas could be used to build evidence-based explanations, they were given tools to use with students that would help them organize developing theories, and were helped to use a new repertoire of talk moves that could mediate whole class discussions in responsive ways.

Participants were observed and videotaped throughout the school year and de-briefed after each observed lesson. Data were analyzed using two aspects of frame dynamics relevant to classrooms (Van de Sande & Greeno, 2012). The first was positional framing, which refers to the way that participants—teacher and students—understood themselves to be related to one another in an interaction, especially regarding the kinds of contributions each of them is entitled, expected, and occasionally obligated to make in group activity. The second was epistemic framing which refers to participants’ understanding of the kinds of knowledge that are relevant to a particular academic activity, the kinds of “knowledge moves” they need to succeed in their activity (Author, 2005).

Three themes emerged from this study. First, the ways that teachers positioned students— as either answer-givers or explanation-builders—and how teachers treated student responses seemed to influence the rigor in the discursive episode. When teachers positioned students as answer-givers, student responses were short and the teacher evaluated them; when teachers positioned students as explanation-builders, responses were treated as resources that the teacher helped students build on. However when teachers attempted to sustain discussions by using a strategy of “accepting all answers” as equal, it did not move students’ thinking forward. On the other hand, teachers who treated ideas within student responses as topics for debate, ended up involving students in creating and validating new ideas.

Specific discourse moves, such as initiating discussions with an open-ended question and then following up student responses with a request to say more, a probe for evidence, or prompt to link one’s idea with that of a peer were strongly associated with rigorous and extended explanatory talk by students.

Finally the use of public tools to make thinking visible, such as theory charts that tracked potential explanations of students over the course of a unit, or models of the phenomena under investigation that had been modified in light of new evidence, appeared to stimulate epistemic talk by students if the first two conditions listed above were in place.

We will discuss the implications of this study for the design of elementary conversations that are responsive to students’ ideas and for the design of coaching experiences in which shifts in classroom discourse are the focus on improvement.

Authors

• Mark A. Windschitl, University of Washington

• Carolyn Colley, University of Washington