Talking to Learn: The Promise and Challenge of Dialogic Teaching

This volume assembles evidence that under certain circumstances students learn agreat deal morethan we directly teach them in school. The central feature that unites this body of research istalk in the classroom—its nature, its quality, how teachers organize and monitor it, how they invite students to participate, and how they guide and shape the details of student-to-student interaction. We now have empirical evidence that structured discussions, focused on specific domains of knowledge and disciplined by shared standards of reasoning, can produce enduring learning gains that go well beyond the topics actually discussed. Recent evidence from several