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. This multi-sourced instruction allows students to work in materials of appropriate complexity and supports a high level of engagement, a sense of ownership, and a personalization of instruction. There is a strong literary emphasis, and language itself is a topic of study.