Teacher A orchestrated children's talk about what they saw in the quilt video. Teacher B posed questions that promoted students' conjectures about causes of observed patterns. Her students scored lower on an initial assessment, but demonstrated long-term retention of what they did learn. The students in Class D also learned much bout transformational geometry, but their knowledge displayed the decay found in most studies of long-term memory. One reason for the decay may be that Teacher D's style of mediating classroom talk did not include either of the revoicing techniques noted in the other classroom.
Students benefit when their teachers have developed clear models of their student thinking.
These models must be sufficiently flexible to encompass the ebb and flow of students' reasoning within the dynamic of classroom discourse. Read this story and more in the WCER Highlights newsletter.