**Pedagogy Matters: Standards for Effective Teaching Practice**

Stephanie Stoll Dalton

Researcher

Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence

Center For Research On Education,

Diversity & Excellence

1998

**Collaborating Institutions**

ARC Associates

Brown University

California State University, Long Beach

California State University, San Jose

Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL)

Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing
(CRESST)

Claremont Graduate School

George Mason University

Johns Hopkins University

Linguistic Minority Research Institute

National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL)

RAND

TERC

University of Arizona

University of California, Davis

University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, San Diego

University of California, Santa Barbara

University of California, Santa Cruz

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# Research Report No. 4

Production: Vincent Sagart and Sonia Kundert

Cover & interior design: SAGARTdesign

This report was written by the author in her capacity as a CREDE
Principal Investigator. The work reported herein and the editing and
production of this report were supported under the Educational Research
and Development Centers Program, Cooperative Agreement No.
R306A60001-96, as administered by the Office of Educational Research and
Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents do not
necessarily represent the positions or policies of the National
Institute on the Education of At-Risk

Students, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the
U.S. Department of Education, and

you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

©1998 by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence,
University of California, Santa Cruz

All inquiries should be addressed to Dissemination Coordinator,
CREDE/CAL, 4646 40th Street NW,

Washington DC 20016-1859.

**Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE)**

The Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence is funded
by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S.
Department of Education to assist the nation's diverse students at risk
of educational failure to achieve academic excellence. The Center is
operated by the University of California, Santa Cruz, through the
University of California's statewide Linguistic Minority Research
Project, in collaboration with a number of other institutions
nationwide.

The Center is designed to move issues of risk, diversity, and excellence
to the forefront of discussions concerning educational research, policy,
and practice. Central to its mission, CREDE's research and development
focus on critical issues in the education of linguistic and cultural
minority students and students placed at risk by factors of race,
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sociocultural framework that is sensitive to diverse cultures and
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unite people.

CREDE operates 30 research projects under 6 programmatic strands:

-   Research on **language learning** opportunities highlights exemplary
    instructional practices and programs.

-   Research on **professional development** explores effective
    practices for teachers, paraprofessionals, and principals.

-   Research on the interaction of **family, peers, school, and
    community** examines their influence on the education of students
    placed at risk.

-   Research on **instruction in context** explores the embedding of
    teaching and learning in the experiences, knowledge, and values of
    the students, their families, and communities. The content areas of
    science and mathematics are emphasized.

-   Research on **integrated school reform** identifies and documents
    successful initiatives.

-   Research on **assessment** investigates alternative methods for
    evaluating the academic achievement of language minority students.

Dissemination is a key feature of Center activities. Information on
Center research is published in two series of reports. Research Reports
describe ongoing research or present the results of completed research
projects. They are written primarily for researchers studying various
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*Educational Practice Reports* discuss research findings and their
practical application in classroom settings. They are designed primarily
for teachers, administrators, and policy makers responsible for the
education of students from diverse backgrounds.

**Abstract**

This paper presents five standards for pedagogy that are applicable
across grade levels, student populations, and content areas. The five
pedagogy standards are joint productive activity (JPA), language and
literacy development (LD), meaning making (MM), complex thinking (CT),
and instructional conversation (IC). These standards emerge from
principles of practice that have proven successful with majority and
minority at risk students in a variety of teaching and learning settings
over several decades. Indicators are introduced for each standard,
revealing action components of the standards and their functions in
teaching and learning. Illustrations and examples reflecting the
standards and their indicators across a broad range of classroom
settings are presented to support a claim of universality for such
standards in K-12 majority and minority at-risk students' classrooms.
The purpose is to urge standards-based reform to reflect its own
recommendation that pedagogy occupy a central place in accomplishing all
student learning.

**Introduction**

This decade's standards-based reform movement emphasizes the centrality
of teaching in the improvement of student achievement. The reports of
the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future \[NCTAF\]
(1996) recognize teaching expertise as the single most important factor
in increasing U. S. students' academic success. Research and reports of
effective practice confirm the critical relationship

between what teachers know and do and what students learn (NCTAF, 1996;
Darling- Hammond, 1997). Because of this, standards statements have been
generated to guide "competent, caring, and qualified" teaching in
curriculum content, induction, student performance, opportunity to
learn, and assessment (NCTAF, 1996, p. 3; see also Darling-Hammond,
1997; McLaughlin & Shepard, 1995). These standards, however, remain
focused more on developing statements of what students should know and
be able to do and less on articulating how teachers are to accomplish
such student outcomes. In fact, statements, principles, and standards
that directly address effective teaching or pedagogy have remained
peripheral in teaching reform (McLaughlin & Shepard, 1995; Noddings,
1997).

This paper presents five explicit standards for pedagogy that are
applicable across grade levels, student populations, and content areas.
The standards emerge from principles of practice that have proven
successful with majority and minority at-risk students in a variety of
teaching and learning settings over several decades. Indicators are
introduced for each standard, revealing the standard's action components
and their functions in teaching and learning. Illustrations and examples
reflecting the standards and their indicators across a broad range of
classroom settings support a claim of universality for such standards in
K-12 majority and minority at-risk students' classrooms.

**What Is the Problem?**

Increasing effective teaching has emerged as the means to improve
schools, meet national education goals, and ensure that all students
experience learning success. But, in Noddings's (1997) view, the current
reform movement repeats the error of previous decades by neglecting to
examine how standards statements respond to the chief question of
teachers---how to help students learn everything they are supposed to
know. He says that reform continues to focus on what students need to
learn but ignores teachers' struggle with how to help them learn it.
Experienced teachers struggle with this question no less than preservice
teachers, yet there is inadequate pedagogical guidance for either.

Reports indicate that principles of pedagogy and their relationship to
teaching and learning theory are generally absent and infrequently
modeled within the continuum of teacher development, from preservice
through in service (Dalton & Moir, 1992, 1996 NCTAF, 1996). This is
demonstrated in statistics revealing that a quarter of newly hired
teachers during 1991 were unprepared to deliver effective instruction,
with even higher proportions in urban and rural isolated schools serving
minority at-risk students (Darling-Hammond & Falk, 1997). Practicing
teachers report that their professional development is generally aligned
with reform goals, but the excess number of topics and confusing variety
of trainers impede their opportunities for complex skill development
(Goertz, Floden, & O'Day, 1996). National surveys and case studies of
reform indicate that when school-based reform does attend to improving
classroom pedagogy, the efforts are likely to be desultory rather than
systematic or focused (Shields & Knapp, 1997).

At the same time, sustained research, analysis, and promulgation of
effective pedagogy does exist, primarily in classrooms serving the
nation's diverse at-risk students. The lack of focus on this body of
knowledge may be due to the fact that U.S. education has mostly attended
to mainstream students who are native speakers of English, although
English language learners (ELLs) have increased by at least a million
K-12 students in the last decade (August & Hakuta, 1997). Because ELLs
continue to be treated as exceptions to general statements, there is
little appreciation that valid universal statements can be drawn only
from the full range of variance in America's increasingly diverse
population. This means that general statements about effective pedagogy
must grow and be informed by study of those students who have been most
dramatically failed by U.S. schools, namely those whose cultures,
languages, or dialects diverge from the mainstream of students and
teachers. This includes Latino and Asian immigrants, African Americans,
speakers of Hawaiian and Appalachian dialects of English, Native
Americans, and low-income students across the nation.

Historically, school success has depended on the advantages that
families and community institutions provide to children from birth. Many
minority and low-income groups have had few language, literacy, or
cultural resources in their families or communities that prepared them
for success in U.S. schools. But when schools improve their teaching,
students---all students---can improve their learning. It is unmistakably
clear what forms of pedagogy are effective and what forms are not when
teaching students who have not had the the same preparation as
mainstream, middle-class students. Principles of teaching that are known
to increase at-risk students' school success are equally effective for
all students; but for at-risk students, they are vital.

**What Is Pedagogy?**

Since at least the Civil War, the common tradition of American education
has been the "recitation script," in which teachers assign texts and
seat-work, assess students' learning, then make the next assignment,
producing short recurrent sequences of assign-assess, assign-assess in
classrooms led firmly by the teacher with little or no student
interaction (Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). Early
in this century, individual student activity performed en masse under
the direction of the teacher was primarily oriented to producing factory
workers (Linder-Scholer, 1996). As this century passed its mid-point,
intense efforts were made to promote student achievement through revised
curricula, expanded standardized testing, a variety of increased and
decreased local control initiatives, and massive federal supports to
increase equity and equality of educational opportunity, among a variety
of other programmatic and regulatory approaches (Darling-Hammond, 1998).

At the same time, more consideration was given to the social
interactions and cultural contexts inside and outside the classroom that
influence the development of human language and thinking (Brown, Stein,
& Forman, 1996; Cobb, 1994; Piaget, 1971; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). It
became clear that the common tradition relies on cognitive and language
development outside of school, in children's homes or in community
institutions such as church, Scouts, clubs, or circles concerned with
literacy and problem solving. Without such prior external development,
most students are not equipped to learn from the assign--assess pattern
of the common tradition (Tharp, 1997). Evidence for this is strong in
Hart & Risley's (1995) study comparing language development and school
success in children of lower and higher social class. The study revealed
the devastating consequences of minimal adult/child interaction time for
the school achievement of low-income children. These effects of poverty
are intensified for students whose culture places less emphasis on
literacy or who do not arrive at school with full English proficiency.

Recent emphases on collaboration, communication, and community for
teaching and learning have increased focus on the role of social and
cultural factors in student achievement (Brown & Campione, 1994, 1996;
Cobb, 1994; Rogoff, Matusov, & White, 1996; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988;
Vygotsky, 1978). In addition, sociocultural theory and activity theory
have expanded definitions of teaching and learning to emphasize their
social, cultural, language, and political contexts (Leont'ev, 1981;
Moll, 1990; Rogoff et al., 1996; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Vygotsky,
1978). In these theories, learning is an active, collaborative process
of knowledge construction located in the interactions of teacher and
student, in the social structures of classrooms, and in the larger
institution of the school.

More than ever before, teaching or pedagogy means that teachers assist
students continuously through interaction and activity in the ongoing
social events of the classroom. For example, oral language development
undergirds all exchanges that teachers have with their students, not
only in lessons. Pedagogy also means that teachers learn about their
students' homes and communities to understand how to draw on local funds
of knowledge for academic learning. Today's pedagogy applies the
concepts and findings of research that show promise for all students'
achievement, such as communities of learners, language development,
guided participation, emergent literacy, funds of knowledge, cultural
compatibility and instructional conversation (Brown & Campione, 1994;
Cobb, 1994; González et al., 1993; McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993;
Purcell-Gates, 1995; Rogoff et al., 1996; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Vogt,
Jordan, & Tharp, 1992). These pedagogical approaches, like other
innovations and advances, are effective or ineffective depending on the
presence of resources and supports for teachers' opportunities to learn,
experiment, and reflect in programs and schools restructured for such
activity (Darling-Hammond, 1997). This pedagogical movement as it is
demonstrated in many classrooms complements the efforts of
standards-based reform.

For example, Darling-Hammond (1997) advocates major changes that would
"encourage the design of grouping structures that create extended,
intensive teacher/student relationships." In fact, the principles for
achieving such reforms are known and applied, having arisen from a
mature research and theoretical literature, mature enough to serve as
standards around which pedagogical reform can rally. The standards for
pedagogy to be elucidated here are drawn from educational research and
current practice that places teaching in the classroom itself; no longer
must education depend on teaching to occur elsewhere. Thus, the promise
of the new pedagogy is academic success for all students, because the
school now undertakes to teach all that its students need to know.

**What Are Standards?**

**The Current State of Pedagogical Standards**

It is unquestionable that teachers must be highly knowledgable about
their content area specialty, whether they teach a specific subject
matter or all content areas in an elementary school classroom. However,
effective teaching that produces academic achievement for all students
requires more than content, child development, and motivational
expertise (Darling-Hammond, 1997). What matters as much for teaching
success is pedagogy.

In McLaughlin and Shepard's (1995) informative report describing current
standards based reform for improving education, they cite reformers'
suggestions for pedagogy. One example states that linking "content
standards and performance standards will prove most useful for
instructional guidance" (p. 22). In another, performance standards are
praised for being more specific than content standards, thereby helping
"to clarify and explain the kind of instruction and learning intended by
the content standards" (p. 34). In such statements, pedagogy is
communicated more through juxtapositioning and by inference than it is
specified or guided.

In guidelines prepared for the certification and preparation of teachers
of English to speakers of other languages, what teachers are actually to
do with students is obscured by emphasis on what students are to know.
For example, the teacher is advised to "progressively develop . . .
comprehension of and ability to interact with English-speaking American
society through mastery of communicative competence in English as it is
used by the English-speaking population" by helping students gain
mastery, awareness, and knowledge (Teachers of English to Speakers of
Other Languages, 1976, p. 2). The dominance of what students need to
know relegates pedagogy to a secondary or even tertiary position; it is
diffused across standards statements. Diffusing pedagogy throughout the
standards creates a discontinuous and potluck impression that
misrepresents the potency of this integrating force for accomplishing
all students' complex learning.

Standards that acknowledge pedagogy's central role, notably the National
Science Education Standards, provide unambiguous guidance for teachers
about how to teach, how to introduce a content topic, how to encourage
students' questions and comments, how to involve students in content
activities, and how to assess student progress continually (National
Research Council, 1996). Useful statements about how mathematics
teachers should perform are also embedded, though not highlighted, in
the standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1991).

**Standards for Standards**

Linder-Scholer (1996) notes that "standards" need not mean templates to
copy or hurdles to jump, but that they can be understood in the original
sense of the word---as banners guiding the way at the front of a
procession. This notion of standards emphasizes their broad base and
consensus nature, a consensus about ideals and principles that must be
enacted in local contexts through local participation. Clearly, specific
strategies and activities to accomplish standards will vary from one
local situation to another. All approaches, however, share the common
intention of aligning teaching practices with the broad statements of
the standards.

Standards, in this vision of reform, provide general guidance for
teachers, schools, teacher educators, and others interested in pedagogy
and its effect on learning. These are not quick-fix recipes for
teaching, but statements of ideals toward which teachers strive and that
teachers can reach through reflection, practice, interaction,
constructive feedback, and continuous learning about local conditions.

In the following sections, the process of transforming known principles
of effective teaching practice into standards for pedagogy is presented
through definitions, rationale, and examples. The purpose is to urge
standards-based reform to enact its own recommendation that pedagogy
occupy a central place reflecting its role in accomplishing all
students' learning.

**Standards for Pedagogy**

In the broadest sense, this paper synthesizes what is known about
effective teaching and learning for all students and expresses that
knowledge as five standards for pedagogy, with indicators and examples
of their functions in real classrooms. These, like other standards, have
been derived through a consensus process following many years of
research and development. Most of the research itself, specifically
pointed toward developing, refining, unpacking and self-consciously
testing the standards, has been conducted by the researchers affiliated
(both formally and informally) with the Center for Research on
Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) and its predecessors, the
National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language
Learning; the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP); and KEEP's
application to teacher education in the alternative program, Preservice
Education for Teachers of Minorities (PETOM) at the University of
Hawaii, Manoa, College of Education. The consensus process included an
analysis of the literature on teaching and learning produced by
researchers and program developers working with the full range of the
nation's majority and minority students in K-16 classrooms. The
standards were extracted from that literature as statements on which
there is agreement about effective teaching across those widely
dispersed and diverse populations. Because these general statements are
based on the widest possible range of diversity, they have validity as
universals, applicable to teaching across grades, subject matters,
curricula, cultures, and language groups. They are not a finished list,
nor is a completed understanding of their functions yet achieved.

As general statements, the standards do claim a high degree of
consensus, however, and that consensus process has developed across more
than the last decade. The process included the publication of successive
versions and explications of the statements (Dalton & Stoddart, 1998;
Dalton & Youpa, 1998; Hilberg, Doherty, Dalton, Youpa, & Tharp, 1998;
Tharp, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1997; Tharp, Dalton, & Yamauchi, 1994).
Simultaneously, researchers and practitioners working together conducted
a national program of oral presentations and discussions in which
criticism and exceptions to the standards statements were invited. These
venues ranged from national satellite-broadcast call-in events to small
conferences of special topic researchers and policy makers, and included
presentations to practitioners in school districts across the country
and focus groups of parents and teachers. In the course of the
standards' development, student teachers, beginning teachers, and
experienced teachers of mainstream, diverse, and at-risk students have
successfully implemented them (Dalton, 1986; Dalton, Blaine, & Tharp,
1987; Dalton & Sison, 1994; (Dalton & Stoddart,1998;1 Dalton & Youpa,
1998; Hilberg, 1998). A high degree of consistency exists between these
five standards and those issued by other national standards groups to
the extent that the others address pedagogy (e.g., the Professional
Standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics; the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards), increasing the
confidence with which we can claim these standards as representing the
clearest available national consensus.

**Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy**

The five standards for effective pedagogy, their indicators, and
illustrative examples of each are presented in the following sections of
this paper. The indicators guide preparation for implementing each
standard, provide a classroom observation format, and encourage
reflection on practice, individually or with peers. The standards and
indicators are presented in list format in Appendix A.

**Pedagogy Standards**

*Five Standards*

**Standard I. Joint Productive Activity (JPA): Teacher and Students
Producing Together**

Facilitate learning through joint productive activity among teacher and
students.

**Standard II. Developing Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum
(LLD)**

Develop competence in the language and literacy of instruction across
the curriculum.

**Standard III. Making Meaning: Connecting School to Students' Lives**

Connect teaching and curriculum with experiences and skills of students'
home and community.

**Standard IV. Teaching Complex Thinking (CT)**

Challenge students toward cognitive complexity.

**Standard V. Teaching Through Conversation (IC)**

Engage students through dialogue, especially the Instructional
Conversation.

Taken together, the pedagogy standards describe teaching that organizes
productive student participation in a variety of activity settings to
guide students' learning in meaningful ways. In the diagram, each of the
star's arms represents a standard, and the star's body integrates them
into an overall effective pedagogy. Each standard influences the others.
For example, the Joint Productive Activity (JPA) standard influences
classroom organization and task design, which in turn support the four
other standards. An increase in the variety and richness of Joint
Productive Activity, such as small groups, provides more Meaning Making
(MM) opportunities, because smaller groups increase opportunities for
teachers to talk with students to learn about their experiences in and
out of school. JPA also makes Language and Literacy Development (LD)
more likely, because students are willing to express themselves orally
and in other ways, such as drawing and writing, when they are working
together with teachers. JPA makes students' Complex Thinking (CT) more
likely, because a teacher who knows students through interaction and
joint activity can individualize instructional levels more sensitively
and can activate peer resources when there are alternatives to large
group instructional settings. JPA makes Instructional Conversation (IC)
more likely, too, because the teacher can lead a dialogue on academic
topics with a selected group of students while the others participate
independently in numerous joint productive activities.

Although the standards clearly function interdependently, novices are
encouraged to apply them sequentially, beginning with Joint Productive
Activity and Language and Literacy Development. Instructional
Conversation is best deployed after gaining experience with the other
four standards, particularly Language and Literacy Development. In K-12
teaching, classroom management and organization are key to effective
implementation of the standards. These topics are treated briefly in
this paper and are discussed extensively elsewhere (Dalton, Stoddart, &
Tharp, 1997; Tharp, Estrada,

Dalton, & Yamauchi, in press).

\[Beginning of Inserted Text/Graphic Box\]

**JPA = Joint Productive Activity**

**LLD = Language and Literacy Development**

**MM = Making Meaning**

**CT = Complex Thinking**

**IC = Instructional Conversation**

Graphic: There is a picture of a star. In the center of the star is
Effective Pedagogy. Each triangle of the star has a different effective
pedagogy. They are JPA, LLD, MM, CT, IC

\[End of Inserted Text/Graphic Box\]

**Standard I**

**Joint Productive Activity (JPA):**

**Teacher and Students Producing Together**

**Facilitate learning through joint productive activity among teacher
and students.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Designs instructional activities requiring student collaboration to
accomplish a joint project.

2\. Matches the demands of the joint productive activity to the time
available.

3\. Arranges classroom seating to accommodate students' individual and
group needs to communicate and work jointly.

4\. Participates with students in joint productive activity.

5\. Organizes students in a variety of groupings, such as by friendship,
mixed academic ability, language, project, or interests, to promote
interaction.

6\. Plans with students how to work in groups and move from one activity
to another, such as from large group introduction to small group
activity, for clean-up, dismissal, and the like.

7\. Manages student and teacher access to materials and technology to
facilitate joint productive activity.

8\. Monitors and supports student collaboration in positive ways.

**Examples of Joint Productive Activity with identifying indicators
follow**

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| ***1, | ***Two Basic Rules: Share And Produce***                     |
| 6, 7, |                                                              |
| 8***  | # First, Second, and Third Grade                             |
|       |                                                              |
|       | In an urban magnet school in the Southwest serving low- and  |
|       | middle-income students (60% language minority), a teacher    |
|       | and her 25 first-, second-, and third-grade students managed |
|       | effective and equitable joint productive (JPA) computer      |
|       | activity. According to the teacher, two classroom rules      |
|       | about computer use helped the students understand how        |
|       | working together could help them be independent, creative,   |
|       | and self-assessors.                                          |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Rule 1** required students to share and help each other    |
|       | with the computer. The teacher frequently modeled joint work |
|       | with students on the computer and called the class's         |
|       | attention to students who were working together              |
|       | successfully.                                                |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Rule 2** required a product from students' activity at the |
|       | computer. "Creative people are producers," said the teacher. |
|       | Products and partners were often self-selected; regular      |
|       | requirements, such as writing class news, were rotated.      |
|       | (Chisholm, 1995-6, p. 167)                                   |
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

When experts and novices work together toward a common product or goal
and have opportunities to converse about the activity (Moll, 1990; Tharp
& Gallimore, 1988; Wertsch, 1985), learning is a likely outcome.
Research on cooperative learning shows that students of color who
participate cross-racially increase their academic achievement,
motivation, self-esteem, and empathic development (August & Hakuta,
1997).

Teachers help students see everyday experience in more complex ways when
students are invited to relate their home and community activities to
learning topics. Activities such as cutting a watermelon to feed the
largest number of children equally or figuring the cost of purchasing an
accurate amount of lace trim for dance dresses can advance everyday
problem solving to more complex levels. In JPA, the product is also
important for its capacity to motivate student learning. An example from
a Kentucky middle school is illustrative.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| ***1, | Students No Longer Ask Math And Science Teachers "When Are   |
| 4,    | We Ever Going To Use This Stuff?"                            |
| 6***  |                                                              |
|       | # Middle School Grades                                       |
|       |                                                              |
|       | At a middle school in Kentucky, teachers said, "We wanted    |
|       | our students to understand the relevance of science and math |
|       | to their world." The teachers have reformed teaching and     |
|       | learning in their classrooms through support from the        |
|       | National Alliance for Restructuring Education (NARE) and     |
|       | technology from Apple Computer. The teachers report shifting |
|       | from "sage on the stage" teaching to guiding students to     |
|       | produce quality, curriculum-based products. "We planned for  |
|       | the students to conduct their own research, run experiments  |
|       | they had designed, and apply what they had learned to answer |
|       | questions involving math and science in their world. We      |
|       | became our students' guides, proposing intriguing questions, |
|       | showing them various forms of technology that could be used, |
|       | and making sure that the curriculum was addressed. We also   |
|       | didn't want the technology itself to overpower the math and  |
|       | science content or to have students produce work that looked |
|       | good, but had little real learning connected to it. When     |
|       | students use the tools of technology, their products look    |
|       | professional, like work that an adult would produce. This    |
|       | result is very motivating, and students who typically might  |
|       | not complete work will continue to revise and work until a   |
|       | quality product is achieved." (Schempp, 1996-7, p. 4)        |
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

The impact of the products of joint activity on learners' motivation and
understanding is often observable. The following examples of JPA provide
evidence of the impact for students, teachers, and schools.

# WHAT ARE JOINT PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITIES (JPAs)?

**1, 5, 7 JPAs Are Collaborative**

Calloway County, Kentucky Middle School, uses computer spreadsheets and
drawing programs to change teaching and learning. To look at human
growth and development patterns, students measure each other using a
conventional tape measure (Schempp, 1996/7).

**1, 5, 7 JPAs Result In A Tangible Product**

Students' growth measures are entered onto a spreadsheet with attention
to accuracy to generate patterns depicting their human outlines. The
students e-mail their computer generated patterns to other seventh grade
students working on the same topic in another state. They print out
their growth patterns to share with peers, comparing measurements and
compiling measures from the entire class to produce a class spreadsheet
pattern.

**1, 7 JPAs Are Collaborative**

At Clear View Charter School in San Diego, fifth and sixth-grade
students studied wellness issues and communicable diseases. They used
petri dishes to grow bacteria and run experiments such as coughing in
the petri dishes and comparing the effects on bacteria growth of
antiseptic soaps and non-antiseptic soaps. From their studies, they
prepared interview questions for doctors and nurses at the nearby
university medical school. The interview was set up between their
classroom and the medical school, arranged using the university's fiber
optics capacity.

**1, 7 JPAs Result In A Tangible Product**

The data the students collected and the information from the interview
revealed antiseptic soap to be most effective in preventing bacteria
growth. In response to the data, students decided to change their own
hygiene habits. Following this change, they tracked the class's illness
rate for the remainder of the year and found it plummeted (Hovenic,
1997).

**1, 4, 5, 7 JPAs Are Collaborative**

The Olympia (WA) School District has a technology plan that involves
students in assisting teachers. By using students rather than
professional consultants to provide needed teacher support, teachers and
students participate together to find resources to meet instructional
goals.

**1, 4, 5, 7 JPAs Result In A Tangible Product**

Students plan and provide training and support for teachers in
workshops. They also support other students. The district believes
students are far more at ease than most adults with emerging technology
and can discover and explain new technologies far more naturally. Fourth
graders show teachers how to create home pages and Power Point
presentations (Harper, 1997).

**1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 JPAs Are Collaborative**

In a Zuni (New Mexico) middle school eighth-grade literacy class, the
ongoing product of the class is a monthly school newspaper. Virtually
every activity setting for the newspaper's production involves joint
productive activity, because every column, advertising segment,
editorial, and news story must be coordinated with other individuals or
groups working on the same overarching organizing product, the
newspaper. The teacher participates as a member of the work team. In
this class, which looks and acts more like a newsroom than a schoolroom,
the energy level is extraordinary (Tharp & Dalton, 1994).

**1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 JPAs Result In A Tangible Product**

The teacher participates in every task with the students, as needed, to
insure the publication of the paper on time. Teacher and students
interact in authentic ways, just as in a real newsroom:

**Arden**: I need to type . . .

**Teacher**: Yours is already typed! I typed it. I typed it because no
one typed it!

**Jenna**: Well, I wanna make changes.

**Rebecca**: Well, you can make all the corrections on it, okay, but it
was not happening, it was, just was not happening.

The newspaper and the class are popular.

**1, 5, 7 JPAs Are Collaborative**

A Grade 1-3 teacher in a magnet school in the southwest incorporated
computers into the classroom to be used in pairs, triads, and larger
groups. The students used software programs to work on self-selected and
assigned projects requiring application, creativity, design, and problem
solving.

**1, 5, 7 JPAs Result In A Tangible Product**

Students produced a variety of products throughout the year, such as
pictures, reports, slide shows, books, newsletters, stories, letters,
poems, and greeting cards. The greeting cards included
computer-generated Valentine's Day cards, which students sold to
teachers and students in other classrooms (Chisholm, 1995-6, p. 157).

**1, 3, 5 JPAs Are Collaborative**

A Chicago elementary school featured a hands-on, cooperative approach in
a classroom where students researched the composition of an ocean coral
reef. Students worked together to discover and design reef features.

**1, 3, 5 JPAs Result In A Tangible Product**

Students constructed a model ocean coral reef in the hallway outside
their classroom where they had room to work together and display their
research findings about coral reefs creatively (Murphy, 1997).

Yesterday's typical ideal school room was organized as a single activity
setting as seen in Diagram 1. Like rows and columns in a cemetery,
silent, passive students worked quietly and separately on identical
tasks. The authoritarian teacher monitored them, judged them, and
assigned more tasks.

\[Inserted Graphic\]

Diagram 1

Yesterday's Classroom

A diagram representing a classroom set up in which the teacher's desk is
in the front of the classroom and students' desks are arranged in rows
and columns.

Diagram 2

Today's Classroom

A diagram representing a classroom set up used in some of today's
classroom. Students' desks are arranged in a variety of designs and
groups. Some desks are arranged in a circle, a square, a triangle,
rectangle and an oval. The teacher's desk is centered along a wall for
open access to students.

\[End of Inserted Graphic\]

Many of today's classrooms organize for the five standards with a
variety of activity settings: cooperative, individual and group work,
teams working with peers and with the teacher. Teachers reporting their
experience in such classrooms describe how they arrange the classroom
for logistical, hygiene, and other purposes, such as having simultaneous
activities take place in separate areas of the classroom. For example, a
triad might work on the computer while a small group listens to a story
read by a peer, a third group finishes a collaborative story draft, a
fourth group collects data on classroom science projects, and a fifth
group constructs a bulletin board displaying a content area concept the
class is studying. The teacher circulates among her students, observing
their progress and providing assistance as needed.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| **1,   | ***Organizing An Elementary Classroom***                    |
| 3, 4,  |                                                             |
| 5, 7** | ## For Joint Productive Activity And Technology             |
|        |                                                             |
|        | In the whole-group instructional area of the classroom,     |
|        | children sit at individual, movable tables. The chairs may  |
|        | be grouped in quads or pairs and arranged in a rectangle or |
|        | horseshoe configuration, depending on the learning          |
|        | activities. During reading time, children may sit on the    |
|        | floor, at their desk, or on the couch in the reading nook.  |
|        | At the computer, children may rearrange seating by adding   |
|        | or removing chairs to work individually, in pairs, in       |
|        | larger groups, or with the teacher, depending on the task,  |
|        | students' computer skills, and student preference. Partners |
|        | may be self-selected or teacher-selected (Chisholm,         |
|        | 1995-6).                                                    |
+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------+

+-----+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| *   | ***Organizing An Elementary Classroom For Students'***         |
| *1, |                                                                |
| 3,  | ***Computer Use And Joint Productive Activity***               |
| 7** |                                                                |
|     | The classroom contains an Apple IIe and a Mac LCII computer,   |
|     | which are placed on two tables                                 |
|     |                                                                |
|     | set in a reversed-L configuration near an exit door. These     |
|     | computers are primarily for student                            |
|     |                                                                |
|     | use. A dot-matrix printer also rests on the table nearest the  |
|     | door. The first computer sits beside                           |
|     |                                                                |
|     | a wall and behind a third table. This computer's color monitor |
|     | is clearly visible to those students                           |
|     |                                                                |
|     | who stand or sit directly before the computer and to the       |
|     | teacher as she walks behind the computer. The monitor is       |
|     | essentially unobservable from other areas of the room. The     |
|     | second computer located at the bottom of the L-configuration   |
|     | is in a high traffic area, and its monitor is visible to       |
|     | anyone passing by or standing nearby. The teacher chose these  |
|     | locations for logistical reasons. One was less dust in the     |
|     | area, the other was proximity to other students, so children   |
|     | could readily seek computer help from classmates (Chisholm,    |
|     | 1996).                                                         |
+-----+----------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Even as powerful computer technology enters today's classrooms, its
potential to advance learning depends on students' opportunity to employ
that technology in ways that the classroom community cares about.
Effective integration of classroom technology must include not only
sharing, joint activities and interactions, but a variety of roles, from
novice to expert, to be performed by both teachers and students. Such a
model has promise to transform learners' views of themselves and the
learning process.

Shifting classroom models from students working silently and alone to a
community of interactive participants has implications for every aspect
of classroom life. Many of today's classrooms have several activity
settings operating concurrently, with the teacher rotating among small
groups of students, working jointly with them, engaging them in
Instructional Conversation, and assisting them in language development.
Classrooms organized for JPA facilitate implementation of the other four
standards described below. Guidance in arranging classrooms for JPA can
be found in Appendix B, "Guidelines for Organizing Today's Classroom
Activity Settings."

An important aspect of this shift in classroom models is the
redefinition of classroom management. Management in today's classroom
involves building a sense of community to emphasize both social and
academic needs (Evertson, Weeks, & Randolph, 1997). In complex classroom
arrangements like today's, management that supports successful classroom
functions may not be obvious to the observer. But orderly and meaningful
learning occurs in these settings, because classroom organization and
procedure are also Joint Productive Activities. In such a classroom
community, adequate time for joint decision making about rules and
problem solving is provided from the first moment of the school year.
Teacher and students progress to complex classroom arrangements through
joint planning, negotiation, and clear understandings about what will
occur.

SCIPP, which stands for Simplify, Cooperate, Ignore, Promote, and
Praise, is a classroom management rubric designed by teachers using the
pedagogy standards to support community building practices in
classrooms. When used systematically, SCIPP guidelines manage teachers'
and students' participation in collaborative and positive ways.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| **4, 6, 8**                       | **Scipp: Learning Community       |
|                                   | Management**                      |
| #                                 |                                   |
|                                   | #                                 |
| # S = Simplify                    |                                   |
|                                   | -   Simplify early tasks to       |
| # C = Cooperate                   |     assure that all students      |
|                                   |     succeed.                      |
| # I = Ignore                      |                                   |
|                                   | -   Use familiar and everyday     |
| #                                 |     language that students        |
|                                   |     understand to talk about      |
| # PP = Promote & Praise           |     classroom activities.         |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Invite students to prepare    |
|                                   |     and provide task directions,  |
|                                   |     instructions, relevant        |
|                                   |     examples, rationales, and so  |
|                                   |     forth.                        |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Ask students what to do: How  |
|                                   |     can we build a community for  |
|                                   |     teaching and learning         |
|                                   |     together?                     |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Listen to students.           |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Respond to students' views    |
|                                   |     authentically.                |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Give important community      |
|                                   |     reponsibilities to students.  |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Put students' suggestions and |
|                                   |     advice to immediate use.      |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Overlook inappropriate        |
|                                   |     student behavior.             |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Attend (look, speak, act) to  |
|                                   |     what is going right.          |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Expect inappropriate          |
|                                   |     participation to disappear if |
|                                   |     it is given no teacher or     |
|                                   |     student attention.            |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   When necessary, give          |
|                                   |     consequences that the         |
|                                   |     community has previously      |
|                                   |     agreed are appropriate.       |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Seize every opportunity to    |
|                                   |     promote and praise            |
|                                   |     appropriate student           |
|                                   |     participation.                |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Applaud students' appropriate |
|                                   |     ways of participating in      |
|                                   |     community.                    |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Praise appropriate            |
|                                   |     participation immediately     |
|                                   |     when it replaces              |
|                                   |     inappropriate participation.  |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Showcase what is going right. |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | -   Promote and praise academic   |
|                                   |     effort in full detail.        |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

**Standard II**

**Developing Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum (LLD)**

**Develop competence in the language and literacy of instruction across
the curriculum.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1.  Listens to student talk about familiar topics such as home and
    community.

2.  Responds to students' talk and questions, making "in-flight" changes
    that directly relate to students' comments.

3.  Assists language development through modeling, eliciting, probing,
    restating, clarifying, questioning, and praising, as appropriate in
    purposeful conversation.

4.  Interacts with students in ways that respect students' preferences
    for speaking style, which may be different from the teacher's, such
    as wait-time, eye contact, turn-taking, spotlighting.

5.  Connects student language with literacy and content area knowledge
    through speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities.

6.  Encourages students to use content vocabulary to express their
    understanding.

7.  Provides frequent opportunities for students to interact with each
    other and with the teacher during instructional activities.

8.  Encourages students' use of first and second languages in
    instructional activities.

Examples with identifying indicators follow.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| **1,  | # Modeling Con                                               |
| 2, 3, | tent Vocabulary With Seventh-Grade English Language Learners |
| 4**   |                                                              |
|       | **Teacher**: . . . if we measure Saturn and Jupiter, how can |
|       | we tell which one's bigger and what did you say?             |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Adrianna**: You measure the diameter.                      |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Teacher**: Uh-huh, uh-huh, you measure the diameter of     |
|       | which one?                                                   |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Adrianna**: Of both.                                       |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Teacher**: Of both and then what did you do?               |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Adrianna**: You see which one's bigger than which one.     |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Teacher**: So you compared the diameters of the two?       |
|       |                                                              |
|       | **Adrianna**: Yea.                                           |
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Language proficiency---in listening, speaking, reading, and writing---is
key to academic achievement. Teachers' interaction with every student is
critical in a view of learning that assumes that participation in social
contexts has an important influence on academic achievement. At the
start of the school year, students' informal talk during participation
in general activities produces information about their language
proficiency, families, prior experiences in school, and participation in
other activities. Implementing the language development standard means
that teachers provide informal opportunities to learn about students
while encouraging students to participate in the emerging community of
the classroom. Based on what is known about the interconnections of
language, thinking, values, and culture, interaction---particularly over
Joint Productive Activity---supports students' academic achievement and
affective development (Au, 1980; Cazden, 1986; Tharp, 1997; Vygotsky,
1978).

Whether in bilingual or monolingual programs, whether instruction is in
English, Spanish, Navajo, Zuni, or Chinese, language and literacy
development in the language(s) of instruction are the foundation for
teaching and learning. The foundation is laid by creating interactive
contexts where students can participate in language and literacy
activities. Clearly, the Joint Productive Activity standard previously
described complements the organization of classrooms for Language and
Literacy Development. In such contexts, students participate in joint
activities from kindergarten through high school to use academic
language and create text on academic topics.

Purcell-Gates (1995) describes how language and literacy are social and
cultural practices that can occur outside of school. This is different
from the traditional view that children begin to read and write only at
the onset of formal literacy instruction. As she explains, the role of
print in children's everyday lives can help them build conceptual
understandings about reading and writing. For children from
literacy-rich environments, their experience of participation with print
in their culture gives them implicit knowledge about the meaning of
print. Those without a literacy-rich background lack implicit knowledge
and thus need explicit instruction for literacy to develop.

In this view, the teacher's role is to involve students in literate
activity to accomplish learning, such as in the biodegradability project
described below. Such a rich activity demonstrates how "reading and
writing are cultural practices, and direct instruction is required for
those experiencing problems with them" (Purcell-Gates, 1997, p. 98). The
implications for direct instruction are clear, that is, teachers provide
specific support when needed in the activity to assist understanding.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| **1,  | **Kindergartners Study Biodegradability**                    |
| 3, 5, |                                                              |
| 7**   | *A teacher described her science activity as follows:* I put |
|       | gravel in the bottom of a 10-gallon aquarium. Then my        |
|       | kindergartners threw in leaves we collected on a nature walk |
|       | and some food items, such as apples. I made sure the apples  |
|       | were near the glass so we could watch them rot. The kids     |
|       | also "planted" a plastic bag and aluminum can. They put      |
|       | potting soil on top and watered it regularly. We put it in a |
|       | south window and they were so interested that they checked   |
|       | it often even during free play. They kept records of the     |
|       | degrading process by drawing pictures each time they         |
|       | observed the project. They labeled the items in the drawings |
|       | which showed the process of change. We discussed the         |
|       | drawings and students shared the most important change that  |
|       | their drawing documented. This information was written down  |
|       | by the student or the teacher and pasted on the drawing. The |
|       | students compiled their drawings in the order that they made |
|       | them to make a book about the biodegrading process. After    |
|       | the project was completed, they placed the books in the      |
|       | classroom library to read with peers.                        |
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

When teachers implement Language Development together with the Joint
Productive Activity standard, they provide an organizing structure for
students to learn language from peers and teacher, and they reorganize
conceptualizations through compelling activity (Bruer, 1993). In JPA,
teachers can generate conversation in students' everyday language about
their joint activity, then bridge to academic language and use of
content vocabulary for academic purposes. The chart below provides a
useful framework to guide interaction between teachers and students to
promote understanding and increase student language.

**Increase Teacher Talk To**:

-   Present information in known contexts.

-   Model appropriate language and vocabulary.

-   Provide visuals and other materials that display language.

-   Use familiar language from students' funds of knowledge.

-   Use sentence patterns and routines often.

-   Adjust questioning to meet students' needs.

-   Ask students to explain their reasoning.

-   Invite students to paraphrase often.

-   Simplify sentences and syntax.

-   Play with words.

The ways of using language that prevail in school discourse (such as
ways of asking and answering questions, challenging claims, and using
representations) are frequently unfamiliar to English language learners
(ELLs) and other students placed at-risk of educational failure. For
these students and others, teachers must draw on the real-life
experiences of their students and arrange frequent opportunities for
students to discuss and write about their funds of knowledge for peers
and teacher. Teachers know the language and vocabulary students will
need to comprehend concepts in the content areas. They can use this
knowledge to arrange activity and interaction that will develop
students' academic language proficiency. Effective mathematics learning
is based on the ability to "speak mathematics"; achievement across the
curriculum is dependent on mastery of the languages of content areas.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+-----+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| *   | **Seventh-Grade Mathematics Teacher Asks ELLs:**               |
| *2, |                                                                |
| 3,  | **How Do You Know?**                                           |
| 6** |                                                                |
|     | **Teacher**: Right. Okay, so, which one was the diameter? Can  |
|     | you guys tell me which?                                        |
|     |                                                                |
|     | **All**: The smallest ones.                                    |
|     |                                                                |
|     | **Teacher**: How do you know it's the smallest one?            |
|     |                                                                |
|     | **Daniel**: Because the diameter is always going to be smaller |
|     | than the, the circumference.                                   |
+-----+----------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Implementing the Language Development Standard means drawing on a
variety of social contexts to emphasize the explicit connections between
students' experience and language, literacy, and academic knowledge.
Topics from TV, the Internet, and movies that students have an interest
in discussing provide the hooks teachers can use to leverage lesson
discussion to more complex levels.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+---+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| * | # Conversation Bridging Experience And Mathematics Topics          |
| * |                                                                    |
| 5 | **Teacher**: What does that (a picture of TV program Star Trek's   |
| * | starship, Enterprise) have to do with math?                        |
| * |                                                                    |
|   | **Luis**: mmm, on the computers, the machines that they have on    |
|   | the Enterprise. Like they measure stuff.                           |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Teacher**: They measure stuff? with their computers, okay. yea,  |
|   | so the sort of things?                                             |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Luis**: Planets.                                                 |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Teacher**: Planets? how do you measure a planet?                 |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Luis**: Mmmm . . .                                               |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Edgar**: You can't measure a planet.                             |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Teacher**: You can't?                                            |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Edgar**: No.                                                     |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Daniel**: Yea.                                                   |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Teacher**: How can you?                                          |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Luis:** You can draw a circle.                                   |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Edgar**: You can't.                                              |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Teacher**: You can draw a circle? is that a way to measure a     |
|   | planet?                                                            |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Luis**: Yea.                                                     |
|   |                                                                    |
|   | **Teacher**: Explain to me what you mean by that.                  |
+---+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Given the increasing diversity of America's classrooms, students' ways
of talking may be unfamiliar to teachers. Regular opportunities must be
provided for students and teachers to practice culturally based ways of
interacting. It is desirable to integrate sociolinguistic practices that
reflect students' preferences for talking with ongoing classroom
activities to respect their traditions and draw from that context for
learning.

For example, in Philips's (1983) classroom ethnography, she compared
classroom participation of reservation-reared Native American children
and non-Native children. She found that Native American children
participated eagerly and effectively when their required performance was
less public, less teacher directed, and free of corrective feedback.
When those conditions were invoked in the classroom, the children were
capable of competent, self-directed performance.

Likewise, preferences of Hawaiian-American students include overlapping
and simultaneous speech, reflecting their oral tradition of co-narration
or "talk story." Teachers can adapt classroom participation to allow
students' familiar forms of conversation, dropping unfamiliar forms such
as hand raising. As Hawaiian students have "talk story," some
African-American students use a form of everyday talk knownas
"signifying." Signifying, as ritual insult, highly values creative and
figural expression in ways similar to authors' uses of literary devices,
such as metaphorical language, irony, and satire, as in the example, "Yo
mama so dumb she thought a quarterback was a refund" (Lee, 1995).

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| ** | Courtesies And Conventions Of Conversation Vary Across          |
| 4, | Communities                                                     |
| 7  |                                                                 |
| ** | Hawaiian-American third-grade students co-narrate in the        |
|    | following conversation:                                         |
|    |                                                                 |
|    | **Teacher**: What shows signs? How might you know when your     |
|    | grandmother is getting older?                                   |
|    |                                                                 |
|    | **Noelani**: Her hair might get . . .                           |
|    |                                                                 |
|    | **Kalani**: No, she gets, face, face . . .                      |
|    |                                                                 |
|    | **Makua**: She gets gray hair.                                  |
|    |                                                                 |
|    | **Kalani**: Her face gets, gets wrinkled. And, uh, the way they |
|    | talk, and they cannot hear so good.                             |
+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------+

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

When teachers and students have common understandings about ways to
communicate, teachers can guide students to proficiency in academic
discourse (Au, 1980). Students, especially secondary students, are
trained to view questions or requests for elaborations as signals that
their responses are incorrect. But students who participate in JPA and
Language and Literacy Development activities evolve organizing
structures for engaging new ideas, changing conceptions, and
reorganizing schema (Bruer, 1993). Because English as a second language
(ESL) studies reveal mutually supportive linksamong language
development, academic achievement, and cognitive growth (Collier, 1995),
language development is important at all levels---informal,
problem-solving, and academic---and should characterize the entire
school day.

**1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8** **Sixth-Grade Teacher Models English
Vocabulary**

Georgia, a sixth-grade teacher, uses pictures to discuss an unfamiliar
topic, European and American furniture styles, with her bilingual Native
American students. The students are considering topics for reports they
are to make. The teacher casually labels (in italics below) the
furniture types while browsing through the pictures.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**Sharlene**: I don't like that.

**Georgia**: You don't like *contemporary* or you don't like, she
doesn't like *old-fashioned* stuff and you like it and she just likes
the new *modern*. Isn't that interesting? I think that's interesting. So
what you need to do is look for pictures that show *romantic*,
French-type . . . that show that. See, that's *romantic*, that's very
*romantic*."

**Erin**: I LIKE that!

**Georgia**: Candlelight. This is *romantic*.

**Erin**: This is gross.

**Georgia**: This is contemporary. This kind, where a lot of chrome, a
lot of laminate, a lot of glass. It's *modern*. See the chrome
bookshelves, see the chrome . . . you're like me, you're like me, you're
the *romantic*.

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

As the students use nonspecific language to react to the visual images,
Georgia unrelentingly, but meaningfully, models English-language labels.
Her style is warm and casual as she seizes every opportunity to model.
In the following excerpt, Georgia's pedagogy is validated: The students
use the terms (in italics).

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**Georgia**: Yeah, this is contemporary.

**Erin**: All straight and stiff. What if we had a *contemporary* room?

**Georgia**: It's almost. It's a mess, huh?

**Sharlene**: That would make it *romantic*.

**Erin**: Let's look at the last page. What's *modern*? Like this kind?
Or this?

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Enacting the Language Development standard regularly has the power to
influence students to understand that talking in the classroom is about
academic learning, that is, being included as a student. Language and
literacy development are fostered through purposive conversation between
teacher and students that leads to academic products in academic
language (Berman et al., 1995; Tharp & Gallimore, 1989).

**Standard III**

**Making Meaning (MM): Connecting School to Students' Lives**

**Connect teaching and curriculum with experiences and skills of
students' home and community.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Begins with what students already know from home, community, and
school.

2\. Designs instructional activities that are meaningful to students in
terms of local

community norms and knowledge.

3\. Learns about local norms and knowledge by talking to students,
parents, and community members, and by reading pertinent documents.

4\. Assists students to connect and apply their learning to home and
community.

5\. Plans jointly with students to design community-based learning
activities.

6\. Provides opportunities for parents to participate in classroom
instructional activities.

7\. Varies activities to include students' preferences, from collective
and cooperative to individual and competitive.

8\. Varies styles of conversation and participation to include students'
cultural preferences, such as co-narration, call-and-response, and
choral, among others.

Examples of teachers using this standard with identifying indicators
follow.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text\]

**1** **Connecting Content To Students' Lives**

About two years ago none (of the students) knew what a biscuit was . . .
. So we made biscuits and I used that experience to teach measuring . .
. . It's all estimation and you have your ingredients that you measure
in the palm of your hand instead of in a measuring spoon. That's the way
they see it at home (Eriacho, Gchachu, & Odell, 1991).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

A wide range of social contexts and circumstances beyond classroom and
school are reported to influence academic accomplishment for all
students (August & Hakuta, 1997). For students placed at risk by
language and culture, ethnographic studies find that their learning is
highly situated within the contexts of the social environments in which
they participate (August & Hakuta, 1997; Philips, 1983; Swisher &
Deyhle, 1992). Certainly, multi-ethnic and multi-racial themes,
activities, and materials have positive effects on the ethnic, racial,
and empathic attitudes of students, especially if they are included in
ongoing daily events of classrooms, but the reality of students' lives
is anchored in contexts outside school (August & Hakuta, 1997; Moll,
Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1992). The Making
Meaning standard encourages teachers to use a variety of direct and
indirect approaches to explore and draw on students' familiar and local
contexts of experience.

The challenge for teachers to contextualize is to uncover and understand
the sources of students' knowledge. When the sixth grade in the middle
school in Zuni, NM, designed a unit on the delicious piñon nut, teachers
used a traditional activity as a context for their students to think
about familiar things in new ways.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text\]

**1, 2, 3, 4, 7** Making School Community Connections Picking Piñon Nuts

# Sixth Grade

The mathematics teacher came in (to the team planning meeting) and
proposed a project with piñons. There is a bumper crop this year. He
said, "I just figured that the piñons are here, and we can't ignore them
since all the students are eating them all the time. Why not study
them?" We all got excited and creative, and in a team meeting came up
with the following interdisciplinary unit on "Discovery of the
Community." We will take our students piñon picking at Pia Mesa Road.
This activity will be integrated into our academic lesson plans in the
following ways:

1\) In mathematics class, students will figure out how many piñons an
average sixth grader picks per hour. They will also weigh the piñons and
practice metric conversion. Students will study percentages and learn
how they are used in marketing, as they plan strategies for mark-ups and
sales.

2\) In social studies, general principles of economics will be covered
to assist students in marketing strategies.

3\) In science, students will learn about the piñon tree, agriculture,
and the environment.

4\) In language arts, students will discuss and write about this
experience. They will design labels for the piñon packaging.

5\) Family life is involved, in that this activity will stress
cooperation, social skills, and community and family involvement.

6\) Students will actually sell the piñons and figure out their costs
and profit. Any profit generated will go into the sixth-grade fund (L.
Yamauchi, field notes, 1992).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

The piñon unit provided opportunities for teachers to work jointly to
plan, teach, learn about the community and its traditions, and discuss
their lessons. In numerous ways, the unit involved the contexts external
to school where student learning is situated, such as cultural
tradition, staple crop harvesting and preparation, and marketing a cash
crop. Parents were included in the field trips and other related
activities. For the students, learning was collaborative, hands-on, and
supported by the community. From the beginning, the tasks of the unit
required considerable group cooperation, interdependence, and student
choice for how to participate, which challenged teachers to grant
independence and students to accept responsibility. Teachers' joint
planning for cooperative, independent, and structured activities assured
success for all students at some level and increased their understanding
of the concepts covered.

Research shows that many students have stronger learning styles for
visual, perceptual, and spatial information than for verbal
presentations. The activity of the piñon unit provided vivid moments for
teachers to move or shift students' informal understandings to more
abstract levels (Preston, 1991). The variety of activity and interaction
in the unit helped students map their informal understandings of how
their world works onto the formal formulas, equations, abstract systems,
and theories presented in classroom content instruction (Bruer, 1993).
Educational research recommends that teachers avoid de-contextualizing
instruction. Contextualized instruction uses compelling problems that
convey meaning and wholeness in verbal and non-verbal forms for those
relying on mental processing in images rather than word associations as
stimuli for conceptual change (Bruer, 1993; Preston, 1991; Swisher &
Deyhle, 1992).

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

# 

# 6 Informing Parents

One teacher who participated in planning and teaching the piñon unit
described it at one of the parent and teacher focus groups at the
school: "It was pretty neat to see how the kids weighed the piñons and
figured out the cost of each bag. . . . All of the activities were
carried out in the different content classes. The cleaning, roasting,
and salting went on in home life and the measuring, bagging, and pricing
was done in math and science. The students dialogued about it in English
class and wrote stories about piñons. This dialogue or instructional
conversation went on with every activity they did. We try to make
ourselves feel good saying, 'well, the quality is there.' This is one
way that we think is much richer than giving students worksheets to do."

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

It is important for teachers to be informed about what goes on in the
lives of their students, particularly those circumstances that may
differ from what is common in the dominant culture or in that of the
teacher. For example, the pattern of parent-child support and assistance
may be different in families where sibling caretaking is characteristic.
For immigrants and ELLs, significant differences between the children's
and parents' education and English language skills change the patterns
of communication from what teachers might expect. Therefore, teachers
may look for alternatives to established practice when planning outreach
to parents and or when making accommodations in instructional approaches
for students (Puchner & Hardman, 1996, p. 3).

In high school, curriculum that is organized around compelling practical
problems provides opportunities for teachers and adolescent students to
design activities jointly that have meaning, personally or in the larger
context of group, class, school, or community. A high school service
learning teacher, Edward, uses such an approach, one-to-one, to
encourage a student to speak and write the language of instruction and
to participate in problem solving.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**5** **Collaborating With A Student For A Community Project**

The following dialogue is about a community painting project requiring
paint donations. The teacher, Edward, talks with his student about
getting donations. The student says, "If they won't afford it, we'll
just do the bridge." Edward reformulates his question to guide the
student to think in a new way about what to do.

**Edward**: OK. If they say "We cannot afford paint," what are you going
to do from there? If they, if they don't . . .

**Arden**: If they won't afford it, they won't afford it. We'll just do
the bridge.

**Edward**: OK, but what if they say that, "we would . . . we really
like that idea . . . we would really like to have your help? Can you
help us, and I'm sorry we don't have any paint." Can you get the paint
somewhere? Or if they ask you to get paint somewhere?

**Arden**: Ummm, make a, make a note or something, see if the stores in
Gallup can . . .

**Edward**: OK, write a letter soliciting paint and direct it to what? I
mentioned Walmart earlier. What stores might have a surplus of paint?

**Arden**: Coast to Coast.

**Edward**: OK, where is Coast to Coast, is it in Gallup?

**Arden**: Yeah. It's that yellow front door . . .

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

As described in the previous section, the Language Development standard
underpins students' academic achievement and also their affective
development based on what is known about the interconnections of
language, thinking, values, and culture (Au, 1980; Cazden, 1986; Tharp,
1997; Vygotsky, 1978). In a view of learning that assumes that
participation in social contexts has an important influence on academic
accomplishment, teachers assure that students are included and that
their interaction styles are respected through a process of negotiation
for the way classroom participants will talk and the topics they will
discuss. This is critical for ELLs, because culture and language
differences in the classroom are subject to misunderstanding by
teachers, thus affecting their interpretations of students' prior
knowledge, capacity for learning, and willingness to participate.

Teachers' and students' negotiations about participation structures are
described by Cazden (1986) as incorporating participants' rights and
obligations, and whose rules of engagement have been mutually
constructed through the social interaction itself. The ways of using
language in school discourse (such as ways of asking and answering
questions, challenging claims, and using representations) are frequently
unfamiliar to ELLs and other at-risk students. Similarly, students' ways
of talking may be unfamiliar to teachers. Regular opportunities must be
provided for students and teachers to practice and share their own
culturally based ways of talking. These ways may include use of
overlapping and simultaneous speech, teasing, signifying, and sounding,
among others.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**8** **Including And Respecting Different Participation Structures**

# Early Elementary Zuni Students' Social Teasing and Humor

The reading program is literature based in Grades K-1. When notes come
from the office for young students, their teachers give them a chance to
read it themselves. Sometimes they choose to do so aloud, reading, for
example, "Walk to your grandmother's house after school." Other students
will tease them in friendly ways by chiming in, "Don't pick any flowers.
Don't break any rules," which are direct quotes from their Little Red
Riding Hood story. This teasing is characteristic of Zuni people, who
are highly socially sensitive. Much social conformity is assured in the
Pueblo through veiled criticism in social teasing and gossip (Eriacho,
Gchachu, & Jaramillo, 1991; Ostler; 1992).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Students' understanding builds as much on what they bring to learning in
the classroom as it does from what they will learn. The meaning making
standard urges teachers to seek out and include the contexts of
students' situated learning to imbue instruction with real-world value
from students' and local communities' points of view (National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics, 1991). Students will struggle with
unfamiliar language and abstract notions about highly integrated
theories in science, math, and other content areas when they are
motivated by interesting activities valued by them and their families.
Osborne (1989), in his study of Native American parents in Zuni, reports
that they want their children to survive and prosper in the dominant
U.S. society as well as in their own community. Such findings suggest a
growing agenda for the school, one that urges compatibility and shared
understanding about the meanings of school, community, and culture.

**Standard IV**

**Teaching Complex Thinking (CT)**

**Challenge students toward cognitive complexity.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Assures that students, for each instructional topic, see the whole
picture as the basis for understanding the parts.

2\. Presents challenging standards for student performance.

3\. Designs instructional tasks that advance student understanding to
more complex levels.

4\. Assists students to accomplish more complex understanding by
relating to their real-life experience.

5\. Gives clear, direct feedback about how student performance compares
with the challenging standards.

Examples of teachers using this standard with identifying indicators
follow.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**2, 3 High School Principal Calls For Pedagogy To Challenge Thinking**

In the past, young people were expected to memorize facts. If students
in a geography class could name the capital of New York and the rivers
that border Missouri, schools felt they had done a good job. But times
have changed, and it's not enough just to know facts and figures. We
need to teach people how to interpret data and solve problems. And I'm
not just referring to the whiz kids in the class, the ones who will go
to Harvard. Every child can be taught to think, and our job is to do
just that. Even when you're teaching Jack and the Beanstalk to very
small children, you can ask them to exercise their minds: Was it right
for Jack to steal the goose? Why or why not? And you can ask the same
kinds of questions with twelfth graders - only now you're talking about
Stephen Crane or Shakespeare (Finn, 1997, p. 4).

**1, 3, 4, 5 Teaching Complex Thinking**

A Vermont teacher begins her cultural geography unit by asking students
first to describe their family culture, then, working in groups, their
school culture. The students choose language and symbols that
distinguish each type of culture. They then identify cultural
expectations for boys and girls as reflected in newspaper cartoons and
television shows from the 1950s and

1990s. Conversation about the contrasts of shows from the two decades
helps students to see that current depictions of gender roles do not
reflect the way boys and girls have to be. Finally, students compare
these depictions with real people to get feedback about how popular
culture influences roles and actions (Rutledge, 1997).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Contemporary school reform is likely to emphasize complex thinking as an
instructional goal, but for many, at-risk students are considered to be
exceptions. Standard IV reflects the clear research evidence that the
teaching of complex thinking, by involvingstudents in challenging tasks,
is a universal principle for effective instruction. This emphasis shifts
the goals of instruction from assuring that students have command of
facts and basic skills to complex understandings that support practical
problem solving in content domains. In mathematics, for example, because
of teachers' assumptions that basic skills and proficient English must
be acquired before problem solving or comprehension can occur,
instruction for minority students is often limited to skill drill
exercises lacking context and problem-solving focus (Secada, 1991). In
reading and other content areas, there are reports that language
minority students' performance indicates that they are denied needed
instruction. For instance, Spanish-speaking language minority students
do not use the same types nor as many problem-solving strategies as
other higher-achieving Latino students (Padron, 1992). The complex
thinking standard describes pedagogy to assist complex cognitive change
for all students. Such pedagogy draws on classroom social contexts and
cultural practices, such as peer and teacher interactions and social
organization, to help students build their understandings (Brown et al.
1996).

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**1 Seventh- & Eighth-Grade Survey Researchers**

In a math project emphasizing assessment methods, students were
challenged to do survey research. The teacher read aloud a news story
about a 10-year-old who surveyed her classmates about the amount of
their allowances. The survey showed that girls received less than boys
even when they did more chores. The students developed, administered,
and reported on a survey of their own classmates to see whether such
discrepancies existed. This project provided students with experience
and data for applying their math skills and critical perspectives.
Students are motivated to learn skills that will help them see through
and into their world. In fact, the students found that girls in their
class were also paid less than boys (Rutledge, 1997, p. 72).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Challenging students in ways that stimulate cognitive change means
encouraging them to review and question their own and others' beliefs
and rationales. Activities for engaging dialogue about problem solving
provide an organizing structure for students to construct new
understandings. Dramatic problems with real-life meaning can help
students at any level evaluate, revise, and reorganize their conceptual
organizations (Bruer, 1993). The object of problem solving is not to
conclude with a correct answer, but to expand discussion and promote
more complex thinking on the topic.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**2, 3** **Little Things Weigh A Lot**

For children who believe small objects, like a grain of rice, weigh
nothing, it is an amazing experience to see that adding grains of rice
one at a time to one side of a balance scale eventually tips the scale.
If each of the grains alone weighs nothing, how can this happen (Bruer,
1993, p. 3)?

**3, 4** **A High School Writing Center**

When teachers come to the Writing Center they are encouraged to make
writing an integral part of teaching. A science teacher took his earth
science class to the Writing Center for a unit on rocks. To demonstrate
more complex understandings in their writing about rocks, students
classified different types of rocks, made graphic representations of
their findings, and then wrote descriptions of each type of rock. By
having students collect, sort, and analyze the data, they wrote in
organized ways about rocks (Rasmussen, 1997, p. 7).

\[End Of Inserted Text Box\]

Teachers challenge students to more complex levels by providing feedback
about how their performance compares to the standard. This means that
all students must receive not only high standards, but guidance and
corrective feedback. For many academic competencies, success means
mastering appropriate cultural practices. "Reading and writing are
cultural practices, and direct instruction is required for those
experiencing problems with them. It is unfair and unethical to withhold
insider information until children or adults 'figure it out for
themselves,' as if they were insiders all along" (Purcell-Gates, 1995,
p. 98). High standards and clear feedback are required to provide these
"insider" skills.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**5 Providing Students With Feedback About Their Work**

**Peers**

Use double entry journals where students pose questions about class
assignments that are answered and discussed by a number of students.

# Self

Teachers and students negotiate standards for classroom performance.
These are posted, discussed, and revised as expectations for products
and performance increase over time. Students use the standards to assess
the quality of their work and their peers' work.

# Parental

Parents' reaction to their children's work is requested. Parental
feedback for homework and classroom products is helpful for assessing
students' progress toward standards. (Duran, Escobar, & Wakin, 1996)

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

Good performance of the Complex Thinking standard draws heavily on the
Joint Productive Activity, Language and Literacy Development, and Making
Meaning standards to present students with compelling problems to solve
and interactive activities for organizing new constructions of
knowledge. Traditional prescriptions for students placed at risk were to
teach low-level, basic skills through many repetitive activities. Now we
understand that higher-level thinking can be developed only when it is
expected, required, assisted, and evaluated for every student. Basic
skills alone are insufficient.

Today, we know that all students need to be challenged to stretch, to
learn language and content, and to think in complex ways beyond their
current capacities. In the same way, teachers who practice the pedagogy
standards amplify their own capacities to understand their students'
theories and concepts. This enables them to to assist the more complex
thinking that students need in today's social and cultural contexts.
Teachers who teach for understanding know that this approach takes more
time, and warrants more time, than cursory coverage designed for
memorization of facts. For example, Bruer (1993) describes the
successful pedagogy of a high school physics teacher who spends over a
week developing Newton's laws in contrast to the one or two days most
traditional courses give to the topic.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**1, 2, 3, 4, 5** **The Bilingual Integrated Curriculum Project (Bicomp)
In California Elementary Public Schools**

In an elementary school in a traditional Russian neighborhood,
predominantly Russian students decided to create a native plant area
with a pond, bridge, and large rocks. They role-played professions of
gardener, researcher, and accountant and called on parents and
professionals for help. After planting in the spring, they prepared a
portfolio including videos, writing samples, and photographs showing
what they learned about the environment while they designed the natural
landscape. Their portfolio was a prize winner in a contest on the
environment (Lorenzen, 1996, p. 4).

Fifth graders, predominantly ELLs, followed up their work in gardening
with laboratory analysis using microscopes and lenses to scrutinize
insects they collected. They classified forms of life by filling in
taxonomic charts. They compared their charts to those of experts to
match their conceptualizations with those of experts. For each category,
they recorded what they saw in the garden. Their study of invertebrates
included the life cycle and morphology of insects. The teacher also used
the taxonomic charts to teach vocabulary, prefixes, suffixes, roots, and
other vocabulary skills (Lorenzen, 1996, p. 6).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

**Standard V**

**Teaching Through Conversation**

**Engage students through dialogue, especially the Instructional
Conversation (IC).**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Arranges the classroom to accommodate conversation between the
teacher and a small group of students on a regular and frequent
schedule.

2\. Has a clear academic goal that guides conversation with students.

3\. Ensures that student talk occurs at higher rates than teacher talk.

4\. Guides conversation to include students' views, judgments, and
rationales, using text evidence and other substantive support.

4\. Ensures that all students are included in the conversation according
to their preferences.

5\. Listens carefully to assess levels of students' understanding.

6\. Assists students' learning throughout the conversation by
questioning, restating, praising, encouraging, and so forth.

7 Guides the students to prepare a product that indicates the
Instructional Conversation's goal was achieved.

Examples of teachers using this standard with identifying indicators
follow.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**2, 8** **Getting Beyond Pi As 3.14159**

In an Instructional Conversation about mathematics, five seventh-grade
Spanish-language minority students with their teacher are cutting paper
circles to use in their conversation. The students have little
experience in conversation about academic topics, spending most of their
class time doing worksheets. The teacher and students fold their circles
in ways to indicate the center of the circle, the diameter,
circumference, and a circle chord. In the English conversation about the
folded circles, the teacher provides many opportunities for each student
to use concept labels. They use strings to measure the circles'
circumference and diameter, comparing them often. The teacher's
instructional goal is to ensure competence with these concepts in
English. By the end of the lesson, students are using the terms
circumference and diameter at high rates. The teacher challenges them to
see the relationship of diameter and circumference through the lengths
of the strings they used to measure. She guides students to talk about
how the strings fit together (Dalton & Sison, 1995).

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

The most productive instructional practice is characterized by
interdisciplinary curriculum and complex problem solving that encourages
students' purposeful and authentic use of language in life-like
situations (Allington, 1990; Chamot, 1992; Means & Knapp, 1991). Yet
teachers talk at two times the rate of students, and more than half of
students' interactions consist of listening or nonverbal gestures
(Ramirez, 1991). Studies examining students striving to learn both
everyday conversation and academic language of content areas in English
indicate that academic gain (content language, concepts, and vocabulary)
requires considerably more time to develop than does everyday language
proficiency (Chamot, 1992; Collier, 1995). Typically, classrooms provide
infrequent occasions for students to participate in meaningful
communication about substantive topics with peers and experts. This
effectively postpones mastery of languages, of conversational
conventions, and of academic content (Au, 1980; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982;
Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992). By middle school, such restricted
opportunities result in language minority students' limited academic
success and low self-confidence in the ability to learn (Padron, 1992).

Instructional Conversation (IC) is teaching through conversation to
guide students to construct more complex understandings of a topic,
text, problem, or other activity. IC takes advantage of conversation's
appeal for students when topics are interesting, and participation is
comfortable and inclusive. Ordinarily, IC takes place in small groups,
though a teacher may have Instructional Conversations with larger groups
or individuals. For example, teachers may work on a unit or thematic
topic with the whole class, followed by small group ICs that focus on
researching and analyzing selected aspects of the topic.

\[Beginning of Inserted Text Box\]

**2 4 8** **Instructional Conversation (IC) For ELLs**

Haitian students learn to listen selectively in a seventh-grade
beginning English language study class. In a "Welcome to School" unit
emphasizing school vocabulary, reading a school map, and listening to
school announcements, the teacher converses with students about a
learning strategy called Listen Selectively, to help students plan their
own learning. Using students' home language, she asks them how they
learn and how they can learn better. They discuss action steps for
achieving their learning goals. The teacher guides students to connect
their action steps with what it means to listen selectively. They use a
chart with important features of selective listening, such as attending
to key words and phrases, to words or themes that repeat, or to words
that give clues, such as first, finally, for example, and so forth.
Students listen to the teacher read the school announcements to fill out
the chart for the information they need. After discussing the chart,
they follow it for the rest of the school day. (Rosebery, Warren, &
Conant, 1992)

\[End of Inserted Text Box\]

**Instructional Conversation: An Oxymoron?**

Thoughtful teachers have noted that "instruction" and "conversation"
seem contradictory. But that is only because Instructional Conversation
is too rare, and many have never seen a good example. It is possible to
fulfill the standards for good conversation and good instruction
simultaneously. It only requires understanding how they work together.
The diagram on page 28 outlines the basic features of each.

When instruction has a clear goal, conducting it through conversation
brings many advantages to students --- a variety of participation
formats and a (perhaps new) experience of being included. The format
allows students to negotiate with teacher and peers to meet their social
and academic needs. Advantages to the teacher include the opportunity to
explore students' worlds of experience and knowledge in responsive ways.
In IC, teachers combine ordinary conversation's responsive and inclusive
features with assessment and assistance to motivate students'
interaction toward an instructional goal.

\[Beginning of Inserted Graphic\]

The graphic has two triangles pointing at each other with a circle at
the meeting point. The circle says IC.

Elements of Instructional Conversation

One triangle contains the elements for instruction.

Instruction Elements

Clear Goals

Assessment

Assistance

The second triangle contains elements for conversation.

Conversation Elements

Responsive

Inclusive

Balanced

\[End of Inserted Graphic\]

**IC's Balanced Participation**

**Teacher Talk**

-   Occurs less than total student talk.

-   Sets up opportunities for students' talk.

-   Has a topic focus.

-   Is responsive to students' talk and language proficiency,
    scaffolding the discussion when needed.

-   Models proper forms (syntax and grammar) of the language of
    instruction.

-   Elicits students' language on the topic through probes about
    reasoning and feelings.

**Student Talk**

-   Occurs more than teacher talk.

-   Is every students' product.

-   Addresses the topic.

-   Uses own preferred style of talking such as co-narration,
    simultaneous, choral, or overlapping speech.

-   Uses proper forms of the language of instruction in response to
    models.

-   Uses content lexicon and concepts in response to models, probes, and
    the flow of conversation.

Typically, IC encourages student participation, but the teacher's clear
instructional goal guides questions and responses to student talk.
Teachers report making many on-thespot decisions to change their
questions, comments, or directions during IC to be as responsive as
possible to students' talk. These conversation methods encourage
teachers to reduce the amount of their own talk to achieve balanced
participation.

**Getting Started With IC**

A teacher begins IC by simply asking students to talk about a selected
activity, text, or experience from their point of view, that is, based
on their knowledge from home, community, or school. The teacher
encourages every student to talk specifically about personal and school
experience that relates to the text and to the concepts the teacher
plans to develop. Students are encouraged to participate in the IC using
language forms and styles that are comfortable for them. Those forms and
styles vary enormously; after all, many cultures have very different
styles for how people talk with each other, and for how children talk
with adults. By accepting students' preferred participation formats,
teachers can elicit more student speech. That gives teachers more
opportunities to promote precise and complex student language
expression.

Precise and complex thought is developed simultaneously.

Here are some of the varied ways in which students can participate in
instructional conversation:

**Student Participation Formats In Instructional Conversation**

• Students bid to answer. • Students co-narrate.

• Students respond chorally. • Students take turns.

• Students speak simultaneously. • Students use overlapping speech.

• Students are called non-routinely. • Students self-select.

**Selecting An Instructional Goal**

IC requires a clear instructional goal and a plan for assistance and
assessment that guides students to the goal. If students have little
common knowledge on a selected topic, a teacher will provide appropriate
direct or indirect experience in the form of hands-on activities, field
trips, or complex real-world problems, or through resource books, media,
or other sources. Such an experience provides all participants with a
shared notion of the intended IC topic, the basis for initiating IC
conversation. While any good conversation requires some latitude and
drift in the topic, the teacher's leadership is used to continue to
focus on the topic goal. While the goal remains firm, the route to the
goal is responsive to students' participation and developing
understanding.

**Assessing Students In IC**

When students share their experience and prior knowledge, they provide
samples of language, which teachers use to assess their oral language
proficiency. From the start, IC establishes a uniquely meaningful
context for conducting authentic assessment of students' language
proficiency. When the instructional conversation has developed and all
students are included, teachers again assess students to ascertain what
new understandings students have constructed. The teacher uses this
information, on the spot, to decide how to develop the IC's content and
length to attain the instructional goal. Assessment information also
guides the design of follow-up tasks, other ICs, and the teacher's
reflection on the success of this IC for students' academic achievement.

**Assisting Students In IC**

Instructional conversation provides unique opportunities for the teacher
to provide needed, responsive assistance. For example, teachers can
assist students to understand narratives as expressions of human ideals
and dilemmas. When teacher/student dialogue builds from individual
experience to text analysis, students can comprehend the text's complex
meanings. When IC is focused on subject matter, teachers intend for
students to develop an understanding of content concepts and content
lexicon and to develop the ability to apply them in conversation about
problem solving or studying a research question. As students are drawn
into instructional conversation, teachers respond to individuals'
learning needs by sheltering (i.e., simplifying) their language, by
active questioning, and by modeling speech and thought.

Teachers' participation in instructional conversation can be guided by
remembering the "three checks." These checks provide good discipline for
teachers' participation, because they allow teachers to guide IC without
dominating it. The teacher's IC script consists mostly of these checks,
which can be in the form of questions or in the form of statements to
which students respond. The three checks are as follows:

• **Clarification**: Teachers assure students' understanding (e.g., Are
we clear?).

• **Validation**: Teachers provide opportunities for students to explain
their reasoning (e.g., How do you know?).

• **Confirmation**: Teachers encourage students to negotiate with each
other about what meaning to construct from the text (e.g., Do we
agree?).

**Enacting IC**

In the following IC, Janet draws her third-grade students into
conversation about their experience with grandparents and the aging
process. The IC prepares students to understand theme, characters, and
events in a story they will read together. Janet's IC goals appear in
the progress of the dialogue as she questions to assess students'
experience with elderly people and assists them to think more about
aging. She listens carefully to students' overlapping speech, is
responsive to comments that advance her instructional goal, and invites
and encourages participation to improve balance of talk without
interrupting the flow. She uses the checks listed above, questioning the
meaning of students' choral response ("Good") and often restating what
students say to find out if they understand and agree as in, "So even
though he's 86, why don't you think of him as an elderly man?"

The IC excerpt progresses from considerations of the physical signs of
aging to a particular grandfather's activity and its meaning for his
quality of life. It begins as Janet is writing on a "semantic web"
diagram, their joint product in this activity, which provides a record
of their talk and thought and a visual display for vocabulary.

\[Beginning Inserted Text Box\]

**1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Third-Grade IC**

Janet = teacher SS = several students MS = male student FS = female
student

**Janet**: How do you feel about your grandmother?

**SS**: Good.

**Janet**: What do you mean, "good"?

**MS in blue**: 'Cause of the practice. She keeps on helping me and she
says the more you practice, you're gonna get a hundred percent, so\...

**MS in brown**: I like my grandpa because my grandpa's\...

**Janet**: No, how do you feel about your grandmother?

**MS in red**: Good, because she was born my mother, my mother was born
me.

**MS in blue**: She helps me.

**Janet**: OK, so I hear you saying that you feel good about her because
she seems to assist you with things?

**MS in blue**: Yeah.

**Janet**: Any other reason you feel good about your grandmother?

**MS in blue**: Uh, she cooks dinner for us, uh, she always buys, she
always brings money on us, buy our clothes\...

**SS**: Yeah.

**Janet**: Umm, so she gives you presents and things?

**MS in blue**: Yeah, yeah. She buys all our presents.

**MS in brown**: 'Cause she never sees you for a long time.

**MS in blue**: She lives with us!

**Janet**: Could you describe your grandmother to me?

**MS in blue**: Curly hair\...

**MS in red**: Uh! I've never seen my grandmother\...

**MS in brown**: Curly hair, black\...

**MS in blue**: Hawaiian\...and, uh, uh, she wear, uh, shorts, uh\...

**MS in brown**: She wears a cap(?).

**MS in blue**: \...she wears shirts\...

**MS in red**: I dunno, I haven't seen her.

**Janet**: You've never seen your grandmother, John?

**MS in red**: Only when I was small.

**Janet**: You don't remember anything about her?

**MS in red**: No.

**MS in brown**: What about your grandpa?

**FS in blue**: She changed, maybe.

**Janet**: Why might she change, Noelani, from when he knew her when he
was a little kid till now?

**FS in pink**: Getting, I know!

**MS in brown:** She's old.

**FS in pink**: Him? (Gestures toward student)

**Janet**: Ahh. So your grandmother is old\...

**FS in pink**: And so is he.

**Janet**: \...and over time, the grandmother would get\...

**SS**: Older.

**Janet**: What shows signs? How might you know when your grandmother is
getting older?

**FS in pink**: Her hair might get\...

**MS in blue**: No, she gets, face, face\...

**MS in brown**: She gets grey hair.

**MS in blue**: Her face gets, gets wrinkled. And, uh, the way they
talk, and they cannot hear so good.

**MS in brown**: They get (unintelligible, kids laugh).

**Janet**: So you see some physical changes in them, like their hair
greying, and their, their\....

**MS in blue**: No, not my grandpa John. He always goes, he always goes
to Las Vegas.

**Janet:** So, your grandfather's pretty active, huh? He doesn't show
it\...

**MS in blue**: He always brings silver dollars, 'here goes some, yeah,
yeah, take 'em\...' (Gestures like he is throwing money down.)

**Janet**: So, does your grandfather seem old to you?

**MS in red**: No.

**MS in blue**: No, um, he's 86, but he thinks\...

**Janet:** So even though he's 86, why don't you think of him as an
elderly man?

**MS in blue**: 'Cause he's active.

**MS in brown:** He acts young.

**Janet:** What do you do to act young?

**FS in pink**: He's active.

**Janet**: Ahh. He does lots of things and\...

**MS in blue**: He, uh, he smokes a pipe.

**FS in pink**: And he does things that old people don't usually do.

**Janet**: What might keep an older person healthy and active?

**SS**: He drinks juice. Food! Food!

**MS in brown**: Live happily and\...

**MS in blue:** Yeah, anytime he goes, pour a glass of milk, I
say\.....He goes, anytime I go to his house, he always goes, pour a
milk, and I say, can I have juice, and he says, uh, no, that's the only
thing I have.

**Janet**: OK, and you also said something, what did he say his
grandfather does?

**MS in red**: Smoke pipes.

**Janet:** No, about, visiting, where does he go sometimes?

**SS**: He goes to Las Vegas.

**Janet**: Why do you think he does that?

**MS in blue**: Play poker.

**MS in red:** He gets money to travel.

**MS in brown:** He's old. And he likes to play.

**Janet:** Alright. So that's kind of like his what?

**MS in blue:** Hobby.

**Summary**

American education is learning from its considerable successes and
egregious failures to build "bridges between students' diverse
abilities, language backgrounds, and experiences and common curriculum
goals" that accomplish "academic success for a greater range of
students" (Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 198). Insights from classrooms
serving students at-risk must be joined with the traditional mainstream
focus to provide the best lens for viewing and meeting the nation's
challenge. These five pedagogy standards offer guidance for teaching
that greatly expands teacher and student dialogue about joint activity
to produce complex learning in the content areas. In classrooms where
teachers practice these standards, even more than academic success can
be present: The standards provide opportunities for every student to
participate, to receive close teacher attention and interaction, and to
live in a classroom where their experiences, ways of speaking, and
cultures are respected and included. Students are expected to learn,
they expect it of themselves, and, most importantly, teachers can assist
them to do it by using the standards for pedagogy.

As banners, the pedagogy standards convey ideals, not templates. This
vision of standards reflects their broad base and consensual nature.
They do not imply standardization, especially as they relate to social
and cultural practices in classrooms. Enactment of the standards must
fit local circumstances and respect unique features of individuals,
schools, and communities (Gallimore & Goldenberg, 1996). Standard III
(Making Meaning: Connecting School to Students' Lives) explicitly
requires localization, and thus non-standardization is a fundamental
quality of the standards themselves. Students today enter schools with
ethnicities, languages, cultures, and individual needs more disparate
than ever before. Community localization and individual responsiveness
to these variations are critical to assuring all students' participation
and academic success.

The call for improved student achievement for a greater range of
students relies on teachers' standards-based competence for
accomplishing the goal (Darling-Hammond, 1997). In fact, Goals 2000 and
the Improving America's Schools Act are explicit that all students'
academic success requires that intending and practicing teachers,
regardless of background, be prepared to meet the needs of America's
diverse student body (August & Hakuta, 1996; Milk, 1990). Pedagogy is
key to teacher preparation that assures quality teaching that
accomplishes all students' learning.

The pedagogy standards describe what teachers do to assist students'
learning in the same way that content standards address broad curriculum
goals for what instruction should address. Performance standards
describe concrete examples and specific definitions of student
proficiency, and opportunity-to-learn standards describe capacity to
ensure equal access to education as defined by standards (McLaughlin &
Shepard, 1995). Together, all the standards, including the pedagogy
standards, make a compelling promise for actually achieving
standards-based teaching reform that makes a difference for all
students.

**Note**

1\. *Teaching Alive*! (Dalton & Stoddart, 1998) is an interactive CD-ROM
containing many video clips of examples of the enactment of the
standards, as well as discussions, transcriptions, associated
activities, and both theoretical and research papers and bibliographies.
It is available for both Macintosh OS and Windows 95 from CREDE
Dissemination Coordinator, Center for Applied Linguistics, 4646 40th
Street NW, Washington DC 20016-1859; phone 202-362-0700; e-mail
crede@cal.org.

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***APPENDIX A***

# Pedagogy Standards And Indicators

**Standard I. Joint Productive Activity (JPA): Teacher and Students
Producing Together**

**Facilitate learning through joint productive activity among teacher
and students.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Designs instructional activities requiring student collaboration to
accomplish a joint project.

2\. Matches the demands of the joint productive activity to the time
available.

3\. Arranges classroom seating to accommodate students' individual and
group needs to communicate and work jointly.

4\. Participates with students in joint productive activity.

5\. Organizes students in a variety of groupings, such as by friendship,
mixed academic ability, language, project, or interests, to promote
interaction.

6\. Plans with students how to work in groups and move from one activity
to another, such as from large group introduction to small group
activity, for clean-up, dismissal, and the like.

7\. Manages student and teacher access to materials and technology to
facilitate joint productive activity.

8\. Monitors and supports student collaboration in positive ways.

**Standard II. Developing Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum
(LLD)**

**Develop competence in the language and literacy of instruction across
the curriculum.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Listens to student talk about familiar topics such as home and
community.

2\. Responds to students' talk and questions, making "in-flight" changes
that directly relate to students' comments.

3\. Assists language development through modeling, eliciting, probing,
restating, clarifying, questioning, and praising, as appropriate in
purposeful conversation.

4\. Interacts with students in ways that respect students' preferences
for speaking style, which may be different from the teacher's, such as
wait-time, eye contact, turn-taking, spotlighting.

5\. Connects student language with literacy and content area knowledge
through speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities.

6\. Encourages students to use content vocabulary to express their
understanding.

7\. Provides frequent opportunities for students to interact with each
other and with the teacher during instructional activities.

8\. Encourages students' use of first and second languages in
instructional activities.

**Standard III. Making Meaning (MM): Connecting School to Students'
Lives**

**Connect teaching and curriculum with experiences and skills of
students' home and community.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Begins with what students already know from home, community, and
school.

2\. Designs instructional activities that are meaningful to students in
terms of local community norms and knowledge.

3\. Learns about local norms and knowledge by talking to students,
parents, and community members, and by reading pertinent documents.

4\. Assists students to connect and apply their learning to home and
community.

5\. Plans jointly with students to design community-based learning
activities.

6\. Provides opportunities for parents to participate in classroom
instructional activities.

7\. Varies activities to include students' preferences, from collective
and cooperative to individual and competitive.

8\. Varies styles of conversation and participation to include students'
cultural preferences, such as co narration, call-and-response, and
choral, among others.

**Standard IV. Teaching Complex Thinking (CT)**

**Challenge students toward cognitive complexity.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Assures that students, for each instructional topic, see the whole
picture as the basis for understanding the parts.

2\. Presents challenging standards for student performance.

3\. Designs instructional tasks that advance student understanding to
more complex levels.

4\. Assists students to accomplish more complex understanding by
relating to their real-life experience.

5\. Gives clear, direct feedback about how student performance compares
with the challenging standards.

**Standard V. Teaching Through Conversation (IC)**

**Engage students through dialogue, especially the Instructional
Conversation.**

**Indicators**

The teacher:

1\. Arranges the classroom to accommodate conversation between the
teacher and a small group of students on a regular and frequent
schedule.

2\. Has a clear academic goal that guides conversation with students.

3\. Ensures that student talk occurs at higher rates than teacher talk.

4\. Guides conversation to include students' views, judgments, and
rationales, using text evidence and other substantive support.

5\. Ensures that all students are included in the conversation according
to their preferences.

6\. Listens carefully to assess levels of students' understanding.

7\. Assists students' learning throughout the conversation by
questioning, restating, praising, encouraging, and so forth.

8\. Guides the students to prepare a product that indicates the
Instructional Conversation's goal was achieved.

Effective Pedagogy

**JPA = Joint Productive Activity**

**LLD = Language and Literacy Development**

**MM = Making Meaning**

**CT = Complex Thinking**

**IC = Instructional Conversation**

\[Beginning of Inserted Graphic\]

Graphic: There is a picture of a star. In the center of the star is
Effective Pedagogy. Each triangle of the star has a different effective
pedagogy. They are JPA, LLD, MM, CT, IC

***APPENDIX B***

# Guidelines For Organizing Today's Classroom Activity Settings

The following guidelines are to help you arrange your classroom
furniture and equipment into activity settings for Joint Productive
Activity. The guidelines suggest arrangements to encourage students'
independence, community participation, and teachers' needs to interact
with students in a variety of formats, particularly Joint Productive
Activity (JPA) and Instructional Conversation (IC). Each classroom has
its own special features to consider in addition to those listed here.
Every teacher makes arrangements for student travel, materials
management, and storage, as needed.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Assign every student a homeroom seat.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Decide how students will store and carry their materials
(folder, writing equipment).

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Make an activity setting (AS) available for large group
instructional activity. For elementary students, this may be a rug area
on the floor. In other classrooms, students must be able to look at the
teacher easily from their seat. Avoid seating students with their backs
to the place the teacher will occupy for large group or other
transactions.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Arrange an AS for the teacher to work with a small group
(3-7) of students regularly that has writing display areas (boards,
charts) and materials storage space. This instructional setting is in
addition to and separate from the teacher's desk.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Make several ASs available for small group work, dyads, and
individual instructional activity.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Assure that every AS work area is visible from any position
the teacher will occupy to facilitate monitoring of student activity.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Separate quiet ASs from potentially noisy ones.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Provide equipment such as task cards, bins, boxes for
placing individual/group assignments, storing students' folders and
texts for each AS planned.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Match furniture to requirements of each AS:

\_\_\_\_\_\_ a. Most ASs need seating for 3 or more students.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ b. Each AS needs easily accessible storage and retrieval
for materials.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ c. Art, listening, other activities need sink, electric
plug, or other prep/clean-up areas.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ d. Games may be placed on the floor or a rug/remnant.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ e. Technology needs electricity, hook-ups, supplies, ease
of access.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Check that traffic patterns provide easy movement between
ASs.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Arrange for space for posting materials or needed equipment
like charts, semantic webs, other joint products.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Provide students with folders to house their work in
progress and their routing plan or contract for the week. Students keep
this folder with them during class.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Designate a storage place for student folders.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Designate a place for student work to be turned in daily
for review.

\_\_\_\_\_\_ Provide mailboxes, folder system, or other arrangement for
returning student work. Students retrieve their teacher and/or peer
reviewed work from this system daily.

**Reports From CREDE**

**Research Reports**

RR1 From At-Risk to Excellence: Research, Theory, and Principles for
Practice, by Roland G. Tharp, 1997

RR2 Scaling Up School Restructuring in Multicultural, Multilingual
Contexts: Early Observations from Sunland County, by Sam Stringfield,
Amanda Datnow, & Steven M. Ross, 1998

RR3 Becoming Bilingual in the Amigos Two-Way Immersion Program, by Mary
T. Cazabon, Elena Nicoladis, & Wallace E. Lambert, 1998

RR4 Pedagogy Matters: Standards for Effective Teaching Practice, by
Stephanie S. Dalton, 1998

RR5 Educational Reform Implementation: A Co-Constructed Process, by
Amanda Datnow, Lea Hubbard, & Hugh Mehan, 1998

RR6 The Effects of Instructional Conversations and Literature Logs on
the Story Comprehension and Thematic Understanding of English Proficient
and Limited English Proficient Students, by William Saunders & Claude
Goldenberg, 1999

RR7 Collaborative Practices in Bilingual Cooperative Learning
Classrooms, by John J. Gumperz, Jenny Cook-Gumperz, & Margaret H.
Szymanski, 1999

RR8 Apprenticeship for Teaching: Professional Development Issues
Surrounding the Collaborative Relationship Between Teachers and
Paraeducators, by Robert S. Rueda & Lilia D. Monzó, 2000

RR9 Sociocultural Factors in Social Relationships: Examining Latino
Teachers' and Paraeducators' Interactions With Latino Students, by Lilia
D. Monzó & Robert S. Rueda, 2001

**Research Reports**

EPR1 Program Alternatives for Linguistically Diverse Students, by F.
Genesee (Editor), 1999

EPR2 Successful Transition into Mainstream English: Effective Strategies
for Studying Literature, by W. Saunders, G. O'Brien, D. Lennon, & J.
McLean, 1999

EPR3 The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol: A Tool for
Teacher-Researcher Collaboration and Professional Development, by D. J.
Short & J. Echevarria, 1999

EPR4 Personalizing culture Through Anthropological and Educational
Perspectives, by R. C. Henze & M. E. Hauser, 1999

EPR5 Implementing Two-Way Immersion Programs in Secondary Schools, by C.
Montone & M. Loeb, 2000

EPR6 Broadening the Base: School/Community Partnerships to Support
Language Minority Students At Risk, by C. T. Adger & J. Locke, 2000

EPR7 Leading for Diversity: How School Leaders Can Improve Interethnic
Relations, by R. C. Henze, 2001

**Occasional Report**

The Role of Classroom Assessment in Teaching and Learning, by L.
Shepard, 2000

**Multimedia**

CD-ROM Teaching Alive!, by S. Dalton & T. Stoddart, 1998 (Macintosh or
Windows 95 version).

Video Pedagogy, Research & Practice. 1999 (VHS format).

**Directories**

Secondary Newcomer Programs in the United States: 1996-97 Directory, by
D. J. Short & B. A. Boyson, 1997

Secondary Newcomer Programs in the United States: 1997-98 Directory, by
D. J. Short & B. A. Boyson, 1998

Secondary Newcomer Programs in the United States: 1998-99 Directory, by
D. J. Short & B. A. Boyson, 1999

Directory of Secondary Newcomer Programs in the United States: Revised
2000, by D. J. Short & B. A. Boyson, 2000

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Programs in the United States: 1996-1997
Supplement, by C. Montone & D. Christian, 1997

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Programs in the United States: 1997-1998
Supplement, by C. McCargo & D. Christian, 1998

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Programs in the United States: 1998-1999
Supplement, by M. Loeb, 1999

**To order copies of CREDE reports, contact the Dissemination
Coordinator:**

Dissemination Coordinator, CREDE

Center for Applied Linguistics

4646 40th Street NW

Washington DC 20016-1859

202-362-0700

crede@cal.org