Introducing: Learning Discourse
The why behind investigations into learning talk.
The summer of 2021 marks my tenth year in education. I came to teaching in my late twenties from an alternative path including lots of creative endeavors (i.e., music, poetry, tech support, event rentals(?), etc.), some experience in educational technology, and a good bit of armchair philosophizing. It’s been interesting to consider this ten year milestone of late, and how it’s led to current investigations into discourse in educational environments—or learning discourse unfettered.
I taught high school English language arts for six years—three in charters in New Orleans, and four in a suburban district outside of New Orleans—before shifting into pseudo-administrative roles including staff development and now instructional coaching. I won’t boast of exceptional teaching and learning in my early years—the other day I quipped that I no longer think I was a bad teacher at the start, just bad at the student academic growth part.
About four years into my teaching journey is when something clicked for me, and the practice started to make a little more sense. I came to a teacherly personality wherein I better held kids accountable to expectations, and experienced a lot more success—at least with the management of 10th and 11th graders time, attention and tasks. As far as the achievement piece—still unclear, though there was the one year where I’m pretty confident our winter ACT boot camp made a difference on some ACT English scores.
In the last four years, I’ve been blessed to contribute to the state of Louisiana’s programs for teacher leaders, and Content Leader. This is where my work took a significant shift into realms of high-quality instructional materials, and deliberate attention to talk moves. In fact, I first encountered “talk moves” as part of the suite of materials for Louisiana’s literacy materials the Louisiana Guidebooks. These talk moves are discourse guides or sentence starters/frames that push learners to meet certain discourse goals: Clearly express ideas, Listen carefully and clearly understand others, Provide evidence and explanations, and Establish new ways of thinking.
My last year in the classroom I was preparing to shift roles and lead my site’s school improvement planning processes, yet I had a few more months with students. I set myself a goal of improving me and my students’ ability to hold discussions in the classroom. Here were my planning ground rules: One open-ended discussion prompt every day; One set of clear discussion guidelines; and Clear accountability/assessment criteria for student participants. I wanted to learn what could open up a dialogue across a roster of students, what could drive potential debate grounded in source material, and what guidelines could be provided to generate more authentic conversation in the classroom.
We learned a lot as a group—those 10th and 11th graders through April and May 2017. I found scholarship around the quality of questions; I found guidance around clarity with discussion expectations and protocols; I found circle- and other facilitation methods; I found a lot of things. Some worked, and some didn’t—but our confidence as a group built and I began to develop strategies for reining in participants who dominated, pulling in participants who were reluctant, drawing forth reasoning and rationale from speakers, and otherwise. These were a formative eight weeks.
That leads me to the start of my doctoral studies. When I began pursuit of an Ed.D., we were guided to think about the types of problems in education we’d like to solve. My work with those students that spring, and my work facilitating change and professional learning at a school site as well as through prepared sessions, inspired me to think about the efficacy of talk and its relation to achievement, changes in belief and changes in practice. Since January 2020, I’ve been investigating the intersections of teacher learning, professional development, formal and informal discourse about learning, teacher-student discourse patterns, and broadly teacher collaborative discourse.
This space will be where I refine my thinking around this area, share some of my comments on research and theory I’m coming across, and pose questions to the amazing education community about discourse, its use in educational settings, its connection to belief and practice, and what it reveals about our values, mindsets, and approaches to our work. I look forward to connecting with others across this community as a result, so please share your thinking and insight as we take this journey together. With that, I’ll leave you with the bit of Holquist on a figure who looms large for me: Bakhtin.
hi, I am new to your work andd copiously reading your writings.
can you recommend some books on discourse, dialogs and art of asking questions. i love to learn more on how to have generative dialog, in nurturing good discourse.