April 18: Dr. Sarah Michaels

April 18: Dr. Sarah Michaels

Professor of Education,Clark University

Co-sponsored by CTE

“Conceptualizing Talk Moves as Tools: 
Leveraging Professional Development Work with Teachers to Advance Empirical Studies of Academically Productive Talk“

12:00 pm

Cubberley 115

Refreshments will be provided

 

Productive classroom talk as a mechanism to promote learning — in all subject areas, at all grade levels — is growing in importance, within the United States and internationally.  Research over the past 15 years suggests that well-structured discussion practices can result in robust gains in academic achievement for students from a range of socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds.  Moreover, there are a small number of carefully controlled, large-scale studies that show that well-structured talk actually “builds the mind,” with achievement gains transferring to other domains, and persisting over years.  But most teachers in the US have a very hard time orchestrating discussions that are academically productive.  In this presentation (developed with Cathy O’Connor, from Boston University), Michaels reports on some recent work and new PD resources for teachers, helping them develop their skill at orchestrating productive talk.  By conceptualizing talk moves as tools, and using video in very specific ways, it is possible to introduce teachers (at scale) to new discussion practices that can serve a range of interactional, socializing, and intellectual functions in ELA, mathematics, and science classrooms.  She outlines some of the theoretical, empirical, and applied advances in recent work on classroom discussion, as well as challenges that lie ahead for making productive classroom talk available to all students.

 

Professor Michaels holds a B.A. from Barnard College (1975), and an M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1981) in Education (Language and Literacy) from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Clark in 1990, Michaels served as Director of the Literacies Institute in Newton, MA, funded by the Mellon Foundation. She also directed projects on language and schooling with funding from the Spencer Foundation, Carnegie, and the Department of Education, while serving as a Research Associate and Instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been the PI or Director of grants and programs (from foundations, state and federal agencies, and private donors). A sociolinguist by training, she has been actively involved in teaching and research in the area of language, culture, “multiliteracies,” and the discourses of math and science.  She was the founding Director of the Hiatt Center for Urban Education and works to bring together teacher education, educational research on classroom discourse, and district-based efforts at educational reform.  She is currently the Senior Research Scholar of the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education. Dr. Michaels is also affiliated with the programs in Communication and Culture and Urban Development and Social Change.

Professor Michaels is currently involved in a variety of research projects which focus on academically productive talk in math, science, and English Language Arts, from Pre-Kindergarten through High School.  In these projects, she is working on curriculum and professional development so that it focuses central attention on rigorous, coherent, and equitable classroom discourse.  As one example of this work, she has just completed a book for the National Research Council (co-authored with Andy Shouse and Heidi Schweingruber) called Ready, Set, Science!: Putting Research to Work in the K-8 Science Classroom. Michaels is also a co-author of the CD-ROM suite of tools, Accountable Talk: Classroom Conversation that Works (in collaboration with the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh), which is currently being used in large urban districts throughout the country.  In promoting teacher research, she works to support teachers as theorizers, curriculum innovators, and educational leaders who use the tools of ethnography and discourse analysis in generating new and useable knowledge for improving instruction and student learning in their own and others’ classrooms.

Selected Publications

 

Michaels, S. & Cazden, C.  (in press).  Reading Comprehension in Class
Discussions.  To appear in, Literacy Standards for the Middle Grades.  Pittsburgh,
PA: New Standards and the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Michaels, S., Shouse, A. & Schweingruber, H.  (2008). Ready, Set, Science!: Putting
Research to Work in the K-8 Science Classroom.  Washington, D.C.: National
Academies Press.

Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L.  (2008).  Reasoned Participation:
Accountable Talk in the Classroom and in Civic Life.  Studies in Philosophy and Education.
27 (4): 283-297.

Michaels, S. (2006).  Narrative Presentations: An Oral Preparation for Literacy
with First Graders.  In, J. Cook-Gumperz (Ed.), The Social Construction of
Literacy, 2nd Edition, pp. 94-116.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

Michaels, S.  (2005).  Can the Intellectual Affordances of Working-Class
Storytelling Be Leveraged in School?  Human Development.  48:136-145.

Sohmer, R., & Michaels, S.  (2005).  The “Two Puppies” Story: The Role of
Narrative in Teaching and Learning Science.  In, Quasthoff, U. & Becker, T.
(Eds.), Narrative Interaction.  pp. 57-91.  Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.

Michaels, S., Sohmer, R.E., O’Connor, M.C.  Classroom Discourse (2004).  In,
Ammon, H., Dittmar, N., Mattheier, K., & Trudgill, P. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: An
International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, 2nd Edition.
pp. 2351-2366.  New York: Walter de Gruyter.