Research

My work focuses on classroom practices, opportunities, and activities that foster language, literacy, cognition, student agency, social and emotional development, and content understandings. In my work with a wide range of teachers and schools, several key findings have emerged:

  • Students don't have enough opportunities to build up ideas and put their ideas into their own multi-sentence responses.
  • Students often do things because they have to do them for school (for extrinsic purposes); they need more opportunities to authentically communicate.
  • There are very few productive back and forth conversations between students; students need more modeling, scaffolding, and practicing of conversation skills to hold high quality conversations.
  • Conversation prompts and tasks need to be improved.
  • Effective conversations help students to build up content concepts and claims (ideas), develop language, foster student agency, cultivate literacy and thinking skills, and build relationships.
  • Communication-based teaching requires: purposeful building of engaging ideas, clarifying and supporting, and bridging of information gaps
  • There are many missed opportunities in content area lessons to develop academic language and literacy through authentic communication.

The ideas, resources, and tools on this site stem from my ongoing research and the findings of many other researchers on classroom language and literacy. Go to the Publications page for more information.