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Rigorous and responsive science teaching is based on supporting all students in making progress in their understanding of important science ideas over time. In this article, we explore how did classroom talk patterns of funneling and focusing support student sensemaking. We share how talk, tasks, and tools within classroom activity work together to either funnel students toward reproducing normative scientific answers or focus students on deepening their understanding about unobservable causal mechanisms of phenomena. We use classroom examples from two science lessons where students used data to describe and communicate about how and why stars change over time. By recognizing these funneling and focusing patterns in classroom activity, teachers can attend to and modify the talk, tasks, and tools to improve and support opportunities for students' sensemaking about important science ideas while they make progress on revising their own ideas over time.

In science classrooms, the epistemic practices of explanation building and argumentation often extend over multiple episodes of talk during a single lesson or across several lessons. Analyzing this kind of discourse requires a way to identify patterns that emerge over time to better understand student participation and how teachers support students' disciplinary work. In this paper, we share the development of a unique graphic representation of classroom talk which we call barcodes. These barcodes assisted our analysis of when and how, over multiple points in a school year, three elementary science teachers facilitated students' science sensemaking during whole-class discussions in ways that ended up promoting, sustaining, or constraining students' collective development of ideas. Barcodes allowed us to see that each teacher regularly engaged students in rigorous whole-class talk over a school year, yet each classroom had distinct patterns of teacher involvement and activity sequences that preceded or co-occurred with these conversations. Paired with transcripts, barcodes illuminated a relationship between teacher responsiveness to specific student ideas and higher discursive rigor. Finally, iterative cross-referencing between barcodes and transcripts sparked further inquiries into supportive conditions for talk that were not as apparent using transcripts alone. In this way, the barcode functioned both as an analytical tool and a final visualization of discourse events in a series of lessons from grades 5 and 6 science classrooms.

Background/ContextThere are few examples from classrooms or the literature that provide a clear vision of teaching that simultaneously promotes rigorous disciplinary activity and is responsive to all students. Maintaining rigorous and equitable classroom discourse is a worthy goal, yet there is no clear consensus of how this actually works in a classroom.Focus of StudyWhat does highly rigorous and responsive talk sound like and how is this dialogue embedded in the social practices and activities of classrooms? Our aim was to examine student and teacher interactions in classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) and contribute to a growing body of research that specifies equity in classroom practice.Research DesignThis mixed-method study examines differences in discourse within and across classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) that elevated, or failed to elevate, students’ explanatory rigor in equitable ways. Data include 222 secondary science lessons (1,174 episodes) from 37 novice teachers. Lessons were videotaped and analyzed for the depth of students’ explanatory talk and the quality of responsive dialogue.FindingsThe findings support three statistical claims. First, high levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students’ ideas or puzzlements. Second, the architecture of a lesson matters. Teachers and students engaging in highly rigorous and responsive lessons turned potentially trivial episodes (such as warm-ups) of science activity into robust learning experiences, connected to other episodes in the same lesson. Third, episodes featuring one or more forms of responsive talk elevated rigor. There were three forms of responsive talk observed in classrooms: building on students’ science ideas, attending to students’ participation in the learning community, and folding in students’ lived experiences. Small but strategic moves within these forms were consequential for supporting rigor.Conclusions/RecommendationsThis paper challenges the notion that rigor and responsiveness are attributes of curricula or individual teachers. Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences; the interactions within the classroom are essential for sustaining the highest quality of scientific practice and sense-making. The data supported the development of a framework that articulates incremental differences in supporting students’ explanatory rigor and three dimensions of responsiveness. We describe implications for using this framework in the design of teacher programs and professional development models.

Teaching that is responsive to students' ideas can create opportunities for rigorous sense-making talk by young learners. Yet we have few accounts of how thoughtful attempts at responsive teaching unfold across units of instruction in elementary science classrooms and have only begun to understand how responsiveness encourages rigor in conversations. In this study, the first author taught an electric circuits unit to four upper elementary science classes, exercising a responsive teaching stance. We found that rigorous episodes of whole-class talk were associated with the teacher's use of open-ended questions, follow-up prompts, references to activity or representations, prediscussion tasks, and asking students to comment on their peers' ideas. Overall, higher rigor talk co-occurred with these conditions when used in combination. Despite being responsive to students' emerging ideas, all four classes addressed the science ideas for the unit--an outcome we attribute to the use of an anchoring phenomenon and the teacher's awareness of the concepts required to construct evidence-based explanations for it. Finally, concerted attempts to teach in responsive ways--while also attending to rigor--surfaced pedagogical tensions that problematize efforts to create such discourse-rich environments and inform how this type of instruction might be enacted by others.