Their goal was to develop a better understanding of effective fourth-grade literacy instruction and to find ways to share this understanding with other teachers. In classrooms of effective teachers, students talk more than in typical classrooms. The talk is respectful, supportive, and productive. The teachers not only model the kinds of conversations that they expect, but creating these conversational communities becomes a focus throughout the year. Teachers encourage students to engage with others' ideas.
Authority becomes more distributed than centralized.
Within these classroom conversations, teachers routinely demonstrate how people think as they read and write, identifying their own errors and making self-corrections. Teachers readily admit limited knowledge of some subjects and discuss their fallibility. They constantly model how they learn more about something. Articulation of thinking strategies by teachers and students is evident. They might use textbooks, but they also rely on trade books and nontraditional curriculum sources such as the Internet.