Unsettling Discussions: Teachers’ Shared Practice Toward Disrupting Assumptions About Classroom Talk

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Innovative Teaching Practices: Algorithmic Thinking, Outdoor Learning, and Disrupting Classroom Norms (Table 8)

Abstract

Disrupting the status quo is essential to change across all aspects of inequitable educational systems, including the instructional practices that unfold across each school day. This paper focuses on the practice of discussion as it was taken up in literacy and mathematics elementary classrooms that were part of a four-site, multi-year Research Practice Partnership (RPP) study of school-embedded PD. Our coding analysis of transcripts of teachers’ debriefs of shared instruction across sites showed 1) how collaborative structures and tools for professional learning provided opportunities for educators to notice, question, and unsettle assumptions about what counts as student participation, cede more agency to children, and attend to students’ positioning; 2) similarities and differences in teachers’ sensemaking about discussion across content areas.

Authors

• Elizabeth Dutro, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erica Caasi, Denver Public Schools

• Hala N. Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington