Abstract
Classroom discussion practices that can lead to reasoned participation by all students are presented and described by the authors. Their research emphasizes the careful orchestration of talk and tasks in academic learning. Parallels are drawn to the philosophical work on deliberative discourse and the fundamental goal of equipping all students to participate in academically productive talk. These practices, termed Accountable TalkSM, emphasize the forms and norms of discourse that support and promote equity and access to rigorous academic learning. They have been shown to result in academic achievement for diverse populations of students. The authors outline Accountable Talk as encompassing three broad dimensions: one, accountability to the learning community, in which participants listen to and build their contributions in response to those of others; two, accountability to accepted standards of reasoning, talk that emphasizes logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions; and, three, accountability to knowledge, talk that is based explicitly on facts, written texts, or other public information. With more than fifteen years research into Accountable Talk applications across a wide range of classrooms and grade levels, the authors detail the challenges and limitations of contexts in which discourse norms are not shared by all members of the classroom community.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This vignette is adapted from Michaels et al. (2008).
We are indebted to Courtney Cazden for bringing this point to our attention.
The same observation was made almost two decades ago by Ellsworth (1989), in a critique of Critical Pedagogy, a distant intellectual cousin of the current work on deliberative discourse. The proponents of critical pedagogy (Freire, Giroux, McLaren) also gave a valued place to Habermas’ ethical discourse community and saw a similar form of rational discourse as the way to bring about the new society and the new man and woman. Ellsworth attempted to import these norms into an anti-racism class she taught at the University of Wisconsin and found that many students did not find the norms empowering or even helpful in finding ways to decide on their own group course of action. Their own experiences and norms, and their views of the meaning of the new norms, created barriers to joint action. As the classroom teacher, Ellsworth faced the brunt of their subjective experience of the discourse norms she had intended to put in place.
References
Anderson, R. C., Chinn, C., Chang, J., Waggoner, M., & Yi, H. (1997). On the logical integrity of children’s arguments. Cognition and Instruction, 15, 135–167.
Ball, D. L., & Bass, H. (2000). Making believe: The collective construction of public mathematical knowledge in the elementary classroom. In D. Phillips (Ed.), Yearbook of the national society for the study of education, constructivism in education (pp. 193–224). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., Worthy, J., Sandora, C. A., & Kucan, L. (1996). Questioning the author: A yearlong classroom implementation to engage students with text. Elementary School Journal, 96(4), 305–314.
Cazden, C. (2001). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Chapin, S., O’Connor, C., & Anderson, N. (2003). Classroom discussions: Using math talk to help students learn: Grades 1–6. Sausalito: Math Solutions Publications.
Cobb, P. (2001). Supporting the improvement of learning and teaching in social, institutional context. In S. Carver & D. Klahr (Eds.), Cognition and instruction: 25 years of progress (pp. 455–478). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Delpit L., & Dowdy J. K. (Eds.). (2002). The skin that we speak: Thoughts on language and culture in the classroom. New York: New Press.
Dewey, J. (1966). Liberalism and social action. New York: Putnam Sons.
Dryzek, J. (2000). Deliberative democracy and beyond—liberals, critics, contestations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–324.
Forman, E. A., Larreamendy-Joerns, J., Stein, M. K., & Brown, C. A. (1998). “You’re going to want to find out which and prove it”: Collective argumentation in a mathematics classroom. Learning and Instruction, 8(6), 527–548.
Goldenberg, C. (1992/3). Instructional conversations: Promoting comprehension through discussion. Reading Teacher, 46, 316–326.
Habermas, J. (1990). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kapoor, I. (2002). Deliberative democracy or agonisitic pluralism? The relevance of the Habermas–Mouffe debate for third world politics. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27(4), 459–487.
Kuhn, D. (2005). Education for thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lampert, M., & Ball, D. (1998). Teaching, multimedia, and mathematics: Investigations of real practice. New York: Teachers College Press.
Lampert, M., Rittenhouse, P., & Crumbaugh, C. (1996). Agreeing to disagree: Developing sociable mathematical discourse. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Handbook of education and human development (pp. 731–764). Oxford: Blackwell.
Lee, C. (2001). Is October Brown Chinese? A cultural modeling activity system for underachieving students. American Educational Research Journal, 38(1), 97–141.
Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2005). Developing modeling and argument in the elementary grades. In T. A. Romberg, T. P. Carpenter, & F. Dremock (Eds.), Understanding mathematics and science matters (Part II: Learning with understanding). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lotman, Y. M. (1988). Text within a text. Soviet Psychology, 26(3), 32–51.
Luria, S. E. (1984). A slot machine, a broken test tube: An autobiography. New York: Harper & Row.
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. In C. W. Morris (Ed.), Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mercer, N. (2002). Developing dialogues. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learning for life in the 21st century: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education (pp. 141–153). Oxford: Blackwell.
Michaels, S., Shouse, A., & Schweingruber, H. (2008). Ready, set, science!: Putting research to work in K-8 science classrooms. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.
Michaels, S., Sohmer, R. E., & O’Connor, M. C. (2004). Classroom discourse. In H. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. Mattheier, & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society (2nd ed., pp. 2351–2366). New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., Hall, M., & Resnick, L. (2002). Accountable Talk: Classroom conversation that works (CD-ROM set). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.
O’Connor, M. C. (2001). “Can any fraction be turned into a decimal?” A case study of a mathematical group discussion. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 46, 143–185.
O’Connor, M. C., Godfrey, L., & Moses, R. P. (1998). The missing data point: Negotiating purposes in classroom mathematics, science. In J. Greeno & S. Goldman (Eds.), Thinking practices in mathematics and science (pp. 89–125). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
O’Connor, M. C. (1996). Managing the intermental: Classroom group discussion and the social context of learning. In D. I. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis, & J. Guo (Eds.), Social interaction, social context and language (pp. 495–509). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
O’Connor, M. C., & Michaels, S. (1996). Shifting participant frameworks: Orchestrating thinking practices in group discussion. In D. Hicks (Ed.), Discourse, learning and schooling (pp. 63–103). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pontecorvo, C. (1993). Forms of discourse and shared thinking. Cognition and Instruction, 11(3&4), 189–196.
Resnick, L. B. (1987). Learning in school and out. Educational Researcher, 16(9), 13–20.
Resnick, L. B., Bill, V., & Lesgold, S. (1992). Developing thinking abilities in arithmetic class. In A. Demetriou, M. Shayer, & A. Efklides (Eds.), Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development: Implications and applications for education (pp. 210–230). London: Routledge.
Resnick, L. B., Salmon, M., Zeitz, C. M., Wathen, S. H., & Holowchak, M. (1993). Reasoning in conversation. Cognition and Instruction, 11, 347–364.
Roth, K. (2003). Freedom of choice, community and deliberation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37(3), 393–411.
Walqui, A., & Koelsch, N. (2006). Scaffolding academic uses of english: Accelerating the achievement of secondary school english learners. San Francisco: WestEd.
Warren, B., & Rosebery, A. (1996). ‘This question is just too, too easy’: Perspectives from the classroom on accountability in science. In L. Schauble & R. Glaser (Eds.), Innovations in learning: New environments for education (pp. 97–125). Hillsdale: Earlbaum.
Wells, G. (2007). Semiotic mediation, dialogue and the construction of knowledge. Human Development, 50(5), 275–285.
Wells G. (Ed.). (2001). Action, talk, and text: Learning and teaching through inquiry. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Yackel, E., & Cobb, P. (1996). Sociomathematical norms, argumentation, and autonomy in mathematics. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27(4), 458–477.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Michaels, S., O’Connor, C. & Resnick, L.B. Deliberative Discourse Idealized and Realized: Accountable Talk in the Classroom and in Civic Life. Stud Philos Educ 27, 283–297 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9071-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9071-1