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International Journal of Educational Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures

Teacher practices that promote productive dialogue and learning in

mathematics classrooms
⁎
Noreen M. Webba, , Megan L. Frankea, Marsha Ingb, Angela C. Turroua,
Nicholas C. Johnsona, Joy Zimmermana
a
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
b
University of California, Riverside, United States

AR TI CLE I NF O AB S T R A CT

Keywords: This paper traces the development of a program of work that seeks to understand the teacher
Classroom dialogue practices that promote productive dialogue and learning in mathematics classrooms. This work
Student learning originated in cooperative/collaborative learning research, with a focus on understanding group
Teacher practices dynamics effective for student learning. Over time, it layered on increasing attention to the
Instruction
teacher’s role, and branched out to consider the multiple participation structures in the classroom
Achievement
(whole-class discussion, small-group collaborative work, private student-student conversations).
Mathematics
Each phase of this work brought in a heightened focus on the details of classroom interaction
around mathematics—both in the thinking that students share and in the practices teachers use to
support student participation—to better understand the development of students’ mathematics
learning.

1. Introduction

This paper traces the development of a program of work that seeks to identify the nature of student participation in mathematics
discussions that is most predictive of student learning, and the ways in which teachers can support students to participate in these
productive ways. This work originated in research on cooperative/collaborative learning that sought to understand the links between
the dynamics of student-directed small-group work and student achievement. Layered on that work was attention to the role of the
teacher in fostering productive student participation, both in terms of setting the stage for productive interaction and in intervening
in conversations among students. That work branched out to consider the classroom setting more comprehensively, recognizing the
multiple participation structures that afford opportunities for students to interact with the teacher and with other students (including
whole-class discussion and a variety of settings in which students can interact with each other). Throughout the development and
unfolding of this program of research, we have paid ever closer attention to the details of the classroom mathematical interaction that
takes place–both in the ideas that students produce and share, and in the practices that teachers use to promote productive inter-
action—to understand how classroom interaction shapes student mathematics learning.

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: webb@ucla.edu (N.M. Webb).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.07.009
Received 17 February 2017; Received in revised form 6 July 2017; Accepted 15 July 2017
0883-0355/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Webb, N., International Journal of Educational Research (2017),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.07.009
N.M. Webb et al. International Journal of Educational Research xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

2. Dialogue among students: historical highlights from cooperative/collaborative learning research

2.1. Background

Research on student-led small-group learning in schools goes back more than four decades, with prominent reviews by Johnson
and Johnson (1974) and Slavin (1977) documenting a surge in research that started in the early 1970s. Cognitive elaboration is at the
heart of a number of perspectives about how collaboration with others may foster learning. Interacting with others may encourage
students to restructure their own knowledge and understanding (O’Donnell, 2006). For example, explaining one’s thinking to others
may promote learning by encouraging the explainers to rehearse information, reorganize and clarify material, recognize their own
misconceptions, fill in gaps in their own understanding, strengthen connections between new information and previously learned
information, internalize and acquire new strategies and knowledge, and develop new perspectives and understanding (Bargh & Schul,
1980; Chi, 2000). Receiving explanations may help students correct their misconceptions and strengthen connections between new
information and previous learning (Wittrock, 1990), as well as to bridge their previous knowledge to the new information (Rogoff,
1990).
Cognitive elaboration is an integral part of other perspectives on learning from peers. In the Piagetian perspective, cognitive
conflict − which arises when learners perceive a contradiction between their existing understanding and what they hear or see in the
course of interacting with others − can lead to higher levels of reasoning and learning (Piaget, 1932), especially when learners re-
examine, explain, justify, and question their own ideas and beliefs, and seek additional information in order to reconcile the con-
flicting viewpoints (Doise & Mugny, 1984; Doise, 1990; Mugny & Doise, 1978). In the Vygotskian perspective, the benefits of colla-
boration occur when a more-expert person enables a less-expert person (Vygotsky, 1978) to carry out a task that the student could not
perform without assistance. Explaining one’s thinking can help the more-capable person solidify his or her knowledge and help the
less capable person construct his or her knowledge (Tudge, 1990; Vedder, 1985). In a co-construction perspective, students build
upon others’ explanations to jointly create a complete idea or solution (Hatano, 1993) that no group member has at the start (Barron,
2003; Hogan, Nastasi, & Pressley, 2000; Schwartz, 1995).
The strong relationship between explaining one’s thinking and achievement in collaborative groups has been well documented
(Chinn, O'Donnell, & Jinks, 2000; Howe et al., 2007; Veenman, Denessen, van den Akker, & van der Rijt, 2005; Webb & Palincsar,
1996). Students can also learn by actively using others’ explanations to try to better understand material or solve problems for
themselves (Webb & Mastergeorge, 2003; Webb, Troper, & Fall, 1995). Students can support and stimulate each other’s explaining by
asking explicit, precise, and direct questions that clearly convey particular areas of difficulty or confusion, or areas needing further
elaboration or justification (King, 1999; Nelson-Le Gall, 1992; Newman, 1998; Peterson, Wilkinson, Spinelli, & Swing, 1984), and by
challenging others to justify their ideas (Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999).

2.2. The teacher’s role

Teachers play an important role in supporting effective student collaboration. In addition to preparing students for collaborative
work, teachers can do much to intervene or support students’ discourse during the process of collaborative group work.

2.2.1. Setting the stage for student collaboration

Preparing students for collaborative work. Cooperative and collaborative learning methods give teachers a central role in preparing
students for collaborative work. Preparation can range from as little as describing the behaviors that are expected during group work
to extensive training and practice in social skills. For example, the SPRinG (Social Pedagogic Research into Group work) program
developed by Baines, Blatchford, and Kutnick (2008) focuses on helping teachers create inclusive and supportive classrooms. Tea-
chers provide classroom activities to develop students’ skills in taking turns speaking; engaging in active listening; asking and
answering questions; making and asking for suggestions; expressing and requesting ideas and opinions; brainstorming suggestions,
ideas and opinions; giving and asking for help; giving and asking for explanations; explaining and evaluating ideas; arguing and
counter-arguing; using persuasive talk; and summarizing conversations.
As another example, in work by Mercer and colleagues, teachers and students set ground rules to help students share all relevant
suggestions and information, provide reasons to justify assertions, opinions, and suggestions, ask for reasons, listen to others at-
tentively, discuss alternatives before making decisions, and accept and respond to constructive challenges (Fernandez-Cardenas,
Wegerif, Mercer, & Rojas-Drummond, 2001; Mercer, 1996, 2000; Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, & Sams, 2004; Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes,
1999; Rojas-Drummond, Pérez, Vélez, Gómez, & Mendoza, 2003; Rojas-Drummond & Mercer, 2003; Wegerif, Linares, Rojas-
Drummond, Mercer, & Vélez, 2005).
Structuring group interaction: Roles and required activities. To improve the quality and depth of discussion, teachers can assign
students to play certain roles or require groups to carry out certain strategies or activities. The most common role assignment places
students as teachers or learners to promote explaining and question asking. Some of earliest cooperative learning methods assigned
students responsibility for learning and then teaching portions of the material to their teammates (e.g., ; Jigsaw, Aronson, Blaney,
Stephan, Sikes, & Snapp, 1978; Group Investigation, Sharan & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 1980). Similar role assignments in more recent re-
search are recaller (or learning leader or summarizer) and listener (or active listener, learning listener, or listener/facilitator:
Hythecker, Dansereau, & Rocklin, 1988; O’Donnell, 1999; Yager, Johnson, & Johnson, 1985). The recaller summarizes the material
and the listener is responsible for detecting errors, identifying omissions, and seeking clarification.
Another way teachers can structure group interaction is to require students to engage in specific questioning or explaining

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behavior. In reciprocal questioning, students ask each other high-level questions about the material (Fantuzzo, Riggio,
Connelly, & Dimeff, 1989). For example, students use “how” and “why” question stems such as, “Why is … important? How are …
and … similar?” (King, 1992). Or students may be given questions to help them co-construct and explain strategies for solving
problems, such as “What is the problem?”, “What do we know about the problem so far?”, “What information is given to us?”, and
“What is our plan?” (King, 1999). Similarly, students can be asked to use comprehension questions (“What is the problem/task all
about?”) to reflect on problems before solving them; strategic questions (“Why is this strategy/tactic/principle most appropriate for
solving the problem/task?”) to prompt them to propose and explain problem-solving strategies; and connection questions (“How is
this problem/task different from/similar to what you have already solved? Explain why”) to prompt them to find similarities and
differences between current and past problems they have solved or tasks they have completed (Mevarech & Kramarski, 2003). Or
students may be required to use written explanation prompts to help them to construct explanations, find patterns in experiment
results, justify answers and beliefs (“Explain why you believe that your answer is correct or wrong”), relate prior learning to the task
at hand, and use as well as distinguish between “scientific” and “everyday” definitions and explanations (Coleman, 1998). Central
purposes of these activities are to encourage students to describe and elaborate on their thinking and help them monitor their own
and each other’s comprehension.
Composing groups. Also under the teacher’s control is how to compose groups, for example homogeneous or heterogeneous groups
in terms of gender and ability (Webb & Palincsar, 1996). Research results are not sufficiently clear cut to produce recommendations
for teachers about optimal groupings, however. Moreover, whether a particular group composition is optimal for its members de-
pends on the group processes that ensue, and similar groupings may produce different processes and, consequently, different out-
comes for students (Webb, Nemer, Chizhik, & Sugrue, 1998; Webb, Nemer, & Zuniga, 2002). Given these mixed results, a more
productive strategy for teachers may be to focus directly on group processes rather than trying to shape processes indirectly through
manipulating group composition.
Designing the group-work task. Teachers can also design tasks to encourage the participation of all group members by equalizing
participation among high-status and low-status students. For example, Cohen (1994) recommended that teachers give groups
complex tasks or open-ended problems without clear-cut answers or that require procedures that cannot be completed very well by a
single individual and that utilize the combined expertise of everyone in the group. Although some research has shown more equal
participation rates in groups with open-ended tasks than with well-structured tasks (e.g., Chizhik, 2001 Chizhik, Alexander,
Chizhik, & Goodman, 2003), other research shows that groups may maintain asymmetrical participation in open-ended tasks by
positioning themselves or others as experts or novices (Esmonde, 2009). Accumulated research suggests, then, that teacher attention
to how students interact with each other as they complete the tasks is needed in addition to careful task design.

2.2.2. Beyond setting the stage

Scaffolding small-group collaborative interaction. In a number of approaches for fostering student dialogue, the teacher plays an
explicit role in scaffolding interaction among students. In a method called reciprocal teaching, teachers help students carry out
certain strategies designed to improve their comprehension of the text (e.g., generating questions about the text they have read,
clarifying what they don't understand, summarizing the text, and generating predictions, Brown & Palincsar 1989; Palincsar & Brown,
1984; Palincsar & Herrenkohl, 1999). Teachers initially take the leadership in small groups (explaining the strategies and modelling
their use in making sense of the text), then assume a less active role of coach, and then phase out their support so that students
themselves carry out the text-comprehension strategies in their small groups. Students model the strategies for each other and provide
each other feedback.
Similarly, in Collaborative Reasoning (Waggoner, Chinn, Yi, & Anderson, 1995), teachers carry out instructional moves to help
students think critically and reflectively about literature they have read and engage in intellectually stimulating discussions of it. The
teacher moves are intended to help students formulate their own ideas and consider others’ perspectives: for example, prompting for
positions, reasons, evidence, and evaluation; modelling reasoning processes; asking students to clarify their thinking; challenging
students to think of alternative viewpoints; acknowledging and praising students’ use of reasoning, use of evidence, and clear ex-
pression of arguments; and summarizing students’ arguments. As students gain experience, the teacher says less and asks fewer
questions so that students take more responsibility for giving reasons and supporting evidence for their positions when interacting
with one another. Through these types of social interactions, students have opportunities to improve reasoning skills, which are
related to interest and achievement (Chinn & Anderson, 1998).
Intervening in small-group dialogue. In other research, the role of the teacher is to observe collaboration among students and
intervene in specific ways to alter patterns of interaction. Cohen and colleagues (e.g., Cohen & Lotan, 1995) showed success at
preventing low-status students from being marginalized in group interactions by instructing teachers to assign competence to low-
status students. Teachers observed groups at work to spot instances of low-status students exhibiting intellectual abilities relevant to
the task, publicly identified the contributions, and commented on the importance and value of them.
In a series of studies, Gillies and colleagues (e.g., Gillies, 2003, 2004) trained teachers to intervene with groups to help students
actively listen to each other, provide constructive feedback for each other’s suggestions and ideas, encourage all group members to
contribute to the group task, try to understand other group members’ perspectives, and monitor and evaluate the progress of the
group. Teachers intervened by asking students probing and clarifying questions, acknowledging and validating students’ ideas,
identifying discrepancies in students’ work and clarifying the options they may take, and offering suggestions in a tentative fashion.
By increasing students’ awareness of what they did and did not understand, teacher interventions enhanced students’ cognitive
development.
Whether, and how, teachers should intervene with collaborative groups is not without controversy, however. While some

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researchers have cautioned that teachers should not provide too much explicit content-focused help to collaborative groups (Chiu,
2004; Cohen, 1994; Dekker & Elshout-Mohr, 2004; Gillies, 2004), other researchers have not found such interventions to be harmful
(Meloth & Deering, 1999). Researchers do agree on the importance of teachers listening to the collaborative groups before inter-
vening. That is, how and when teachers should intervene should be guided by what teachers learn about the details of student
thinking (see for example, Fennema et al., 1996; Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001; Franke, Kazemi, & Battey, 2007; Lampert,
1990; Mercer, 2000).
Interacting with students during whole-class discussion. A small body of research shows how the patterns of teacher interactions with
students in the whole-class context may influence the depth of students’ discussions in collaborative groups. For example, when
teachers press students to explain their thinking during whole-class discussion—pushing them to explain beyond their initial de-
scriptions or explanations of their strategies for solving mathematics problems, pushing them to generalize from text—students in
turn elaborate on their ideas and ask each other to explain their reasoning during their small-group collaborations (Kazemi & Stipek,
2001; Smagorinsky & Fly, 1993). On the other hand, when teachers assume responsibility for doing most of the work during whole-
class instruction—such as setting up the steps in the mathematics problems and asking students only to provide the results of specific
calculations that the teachers themselves pose, or assuming responsibility for interpreting text and rarely asking students to con-
tribute– the students in their group work may correspondingly provide low-level information without elaborating on their thinking
(Smagorinsky & Fly, 1993; Webb et al., 2006).
Constructing and reinforcing classroom norms about student collaboration. Teachers play an important role in constructing and re-
inforcing classroom norms about how students should engage with each other in collaborative groups. In much of the work in the
preceding section, teachers set expectations for engagement by discussing students’ obligations for collaboration prior to group work.
Yackel and colleagues (Yackel, Cobb, Wood, Wheatley, & Merkel, 1990; Yackel, Cobb & Wood, 1991) describe how teachers can also
strengthen norms for collaboration during their ongoing interactions with the class, for example, by bringing to whole-class dis-
cussion specific situations that arise spontaneously during group work (e.g., one student completing the work without his teammates
understanding his work or generating solutions of their own) as springboards to discuss students’ responsibilities to explain their
ideas and challenge others during group work.

3. Extending the research: attending to the details of students’ mathematical thinking

In 2006, we embarked on a program of research to further clarify the links among student collaboration, teachers’ practices that
foster productive collaboration, and student learning outcomes in mathematics. This program of research extended previous work in
two ways. First, this work involved closer attention to the mathematical content of student and teacher interaction than much of the
previous research described above. The increased focus on the details of mathematical thinking in was informed by a line of research
called Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) that demonstrates that teachers’ attention to the details of students’ mathematical
thinking impacts teacher practice and student learning (Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Franke, 1989; Jacobs, Franke,
Carpenter, Levi, & Battey, 2007). For example, longitudinal and case studies showed (1) that developing an understanding of chil-
dren’s mathematical thinking provides a basis for change in teacher practice, and (2) that changes in teacher practice occur as
teachers attempt to use their knowledge about children’s mathematical thinking to understand their own students (Carpenter,
Fennema, & Franke 1996; Fennema, Carpenter, Franke, & Carey, 1992; Fennema, Franke, Carpenter, & Carey 1993;, Fennema
et al.,1996; Franke, Fennema, Carpenter, Ansell, & Behrend, 1998; Franke et al., 2001). Thus, the new program of research built in
heightened sensitivity to students’ communication of details of their mathematical thinking in their interactions with others, and to
teachers’ attention to those details in their efforts to promote productive student interaction.
Second, it broadened the scope of interaction being considered to include whole-class discussion as well peer-directed small-group
work. That is, we analyzed student participation in whole-class mathematical conversations as well as in small-group collaborations,
and we analyzed teacher practices to foster productive student participation both in whole-class and small-group mathematical
conversations. The research described in the previous section had already started to explicitly address the fact that teachers can
influence student collaboration both through their practices in whole-class discussion and when intervening with small groups.
Reflecting this more comprehensive view of classroom interaction, we felt it important to recognize and address the multiple
structures in the classroom in which students interact with others. In doing so, this program of research extends beyond much
traditional cooperative/collaborative learning work to consider how students interact with others both within and outside peer-
directed group settings.
Moving this work forward required investigating classroom interaction and student outcomes more intensively than in much
previous work. We had to devise new data collection methods to capture and be able to code audio and video information for as many
students as possible within each classroom on each occasion of observation, for the multiple settings within the classroom (e.g.,
whole-class discussion, small-group work), and for conversations taking place both with and apart from the teacher. In the new series
of studies, then, we were able to capture the interaction of all students (often for entire lessons) on multiple occasions. It was also
important to situate the work in classrooms in which students conversed about mathematics in a variety of settings. Thus, we focused
on classrooms of teachers who were committed to involving students in whole-class conversations about mathematics and who
incorporated student-directed small-group collaboration into their lessons.

3.1. Student participation: explaining one’s thinking and engaging with others’ ideas

Paying closer attention to the details of students’ mathematical thinking produced new insights into the kinds of student

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Table 1
Examples of student explanations and engagement with others’ ideas.

Student Participation Example

Explanation category
Correct and complete Problem: 10 + 10–10 = 5 + __
Five? It’s ‘cause look. We could do this, oh no. Hold up. “Cause ten plus ten equals twenty, huh? And then it says
minus ten equals five plus blank. So it gotta be equal ten, so five plus five equals ten. And that”s how I got it. Get
it?
Ambiguous or Incomplete Problem: 8 + 2 = 7 + 3 (True or False?)
[True] because there’s a two and a three and a seven and an eight. They’re like an order. [While the answer is
correct, this explanation does not make it clear (a) whether the student is considering the difference in quantity between
2 and 3 and between 7 and 8, (b) what the student means by “order”, and (c) how the student is using “order” to justify
that the number sentence is true.]
Incorrect Problem: 4 + 9 = 5 × 3 − 2 (True or False?)
I thought it was false because four plus nine is thirteen, and five times three is fifteen. Those two do not match.
Engagement category
Adding details; challenging others with Problem: A hammer factory produces hammers for $6 each. How many hammers can Home Depot buy for $954?
reasons Student 1: I was thinking of skip counting by sixes until we get 900, and then we put 50 times on the side.
Student 2: Can I just do a little edit to yours? Instead of doing six how many times, wouldn’t it be faster to do it
by twelves?
Student 1: So we count by twelves, so we group two sixes?
Student 2: I feel like we should be doing something faster.
Student 1: We are barely on 144 and we have to go to 900, so do you want to count by hundreds?
Repeating details without adding Problem: William Green School wants to buy more basketballs for the school. If new basketballs cost $4 each, how many
basketballs can the school buy with $553?
Student 1: OK, so maybe we should do 4 times 125. I know that will equal 500 because if you do 4 times 100
that’s already 400. And 4 times 25 is 100.
Student 2: Oh, so what you’re saying is that you already have 400. And if you do 4 times 25, that will equal
another 100. If you do the 400 you already got, you add another 100, that will equal 500?
Acknowledging without details Problem: Sascha has 8 baseball cards. Her mom gives her 7 more for her birthday. How many baseball cards does
Sascha have now?
Student 1: I counted. I did 8 then 9,10,11,12,13,14,15.
Student 2: Me too. I did it the same as you.

interaction that predict students’ mathematics achievement. First, we found that both explaining one’s own ideas and engaging with
the details of other students’ ideas significantly predicted student learning outcomes, even after controlling for prior knowledge
(Webb et al., 2008, 2009, 2014). Second, the level and nature of mathematical detail in explanations and engagement determined the
links with achievement.
Our coding of explaining one’s own ideas moved beyond previous approaches that considered whether students provided detail
about their problem-solving strategies (that is, did students give an elaborated description of their thinking or only their answer to the
math problem?), to considering whether the details that students provided were fully correct, whether students explained the full
strategy or mathematical idea, and whether their explanation as a whole was complete or unambiguous mathematically. We found
that students who gave correct, complete, and unambiguous explanations obtained higher achievement test scores than students who
gave only explanations that were ambiguous, incomplete, or incorrect, or gave no explanations (see examples in Table 1).
Recognizing that much of the potential power of collaborative work lies in the exchange of ideas, we extended our view of
interaction to include engaging with others’ mathematical ideas. We found that students who engaged with others’ ideas at a high
level (e.g., adding details to other students’ mathematical ideas; challenging others with mathematical reasons) performed better than
students who engaged with the details of others’ ideas but did not add to others’ ideas (e.g., repeating others’ strategies) or who
engaged with others’ ideas without mentioning details (e.g., agreeing or disagreeing without detail or reasons; Table 1).

3.2. Teacher support of student interaction

Corresponding to the closer analysis of student interaction, we started paying closer attention to how teachers supported students
to engage in mathematical conversations at a high level. It became clear that it was important to consider both the initial moves that
teachers made to support students to participate and ways in which teachers followed-up with students beyond those initial moves. In
addition, because much student interaction occurred apart from the teacher’s direct involvement, an important question emerged
about how teachers supported students to engage with each other when the teacher was not present in the interaction.

3.2.1. Teacher support of students explaining their own ideas

As will be described below, the new studies included a greater a range of variables related to student participation and teacher
support of student participation than hitherto explored. In brief, the multiple student participation-related variables related to the
accuracy and completeness of student answers and explanations and the extent to which students engaged with other students’
thinking, and the multiple teacher practice-related variables focused on initial moves that teachers made to support students to
participate, ways in which teachers followed-up with students beyond initial moves, and ways in which teachers supported students

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Table 2
Example of teacher probing of a student explanation leading to clarification.

Problem: 200 + 1 = 200 + 1; 200 + 1 = 1 + 200; Does it matter which way I put the numbers?

Student It doesn’t matter which way you put it because it still has a partner.
Teacher Oh! What has a partner?
Student The numbers.
Teacher Could you explain what numbers you are talking about?
Student 200 and 1. And the ones.
Teacher One more time.
Student 200 and 1. And the 1. 200 and 1.
Teacher 200 and the 1 like this are partners?
Student The 1 and the 1 are partners. And the 200 and 200 are partners.

to engage with each other when the teacher was not present in the interaction. We found that teachers can increase the incidence of
student explaining and the amount of detail students provide by pressing students to explain, clarify, and justify their problem-solving
strategies. Importantly, the teacher practice that nearly always produced explaining, and often resulted in students giving correct and
complete explanations about how to solve the problem, was teachers probing student thinking so that students gave further details
about their problem-solving strategies beyond their initial explanations (Franke et al., 2009). Probing students’ explanations was
most likely to result in additional student explaining (especially correct and complete explanations) when teachers used the details of
students’ strategies given in initial explanations to drive their probing questions, and when teachers persisted in asking questions in
order to push students to clarify the ambiguous aspects of their explanations (see example in Table 2).
Teacher probing of student thinking also increased the incidence of students’ explaining their ideas when the teacher was not
present. In particular, we examined different practices teachers used when intervening with peer-directed collaborative group dis-
cussions, such as probing of students’ explanations to uncover details or further thinking about problem-solving strategies, engaging
with students around their work but not probing the details of student thinking, and interacting with students only around norms for
behavior (Webb et al., 2009). More than any other teacher practice, probing student thinking corresponded with students giving more
details about their strategies (and often providing correct and complete explanations) after the teacher intervened compared to the
explanations students had offered before the teacher intervention.
In addition, when comparing classrooms, we found evidence of the relationship between teacher support of student explaining
and the incidence of explanations when students interacted with each other during peer-directed discussions without the teacher
being present (Webb et al., 2008, 2009). In classrooms in which teachers pushed students to make explicit the steps in their problem-
solving strategies and the details of their mathematical thinking (whether students’ suggestions were correct or incorrect), students
engaged in frequent explaining and provided explanations that were correct and complete when communicating with each other. In
classrooms in which teachers infrequently pushed students to explain their thinking and generally accepted students’ first ex-
planations as sufficient even if they were incomplete or even incorrect, students less frequently gave explanations, especially correct
ones, during their communications with each other.

3.2.2. Teacher support of students engaging with others’ ideas

3.2.2.1. Analogues between teacher moves and student engagement. We observed teachers using a variety of moves to encourage
students to engage with others’ ideas. Teachers encouraged students to ask each other questions (general and specific), restate others’
ideas, note similarities between their own and others’ ideas, challenge others’ suggestions, add on to others’ ideas, and keep tabs on
the work others were doing. Teachers both supported students to engage with others (for example, by guiding students in what to ask
or say) and themselves enacted a certain kind of engagement with a student’s idea (for example, asking students questions, revoicing
their ideas, drawing connections between students’ ideas). We found a close correspondence between those moves and the specific
ways in which students engaged with each other, even when the teacher was not present for the interaction between students (Webb,
Franke, Johnson, Turrou, & Ing, 2018; see Table 3 below for examples).

3.2.2.2. Initial teacher invitation moves vs. follow-up teacher support moves. Further inspection of teacher encouragement of student
engagement with each other’s ideas revealed that teachers carried out both initial “invitation” moves to encourage student
engagement with others’ ideas and “follow-up” moves depending on how students responded to the initial moves (Franke et al.,
2015).
Initial teacher invitation moves. Teachers’ initial moves to encourage students to engage with each other’s ideas included requests
for students to: compare their strategies to those their classmates generated, explain problem-solving strategies that other students
used, ask questions of each other, and work together with other students to create a solution strategy. Initial invitation moves
sometimes yield a high level of student engagement with others’ ideas. But often initial teacher invitation moves did not result in
students engaging with others’ ideas, or not in ways that addressed important mathematical details. Students did not always know
how to engage with others’ ideas, believed that they could not do so, or resorted to re-iterating their own thinking rather than
attending to others’ ideas. When students did engage with others’ ideas, sometimes they engaged with details in a superficial or
perfunctory way. Finally, students sometimes attended to details that were not central rather than focusing on the major mathe-
matical ideas embedded in another student’s work. To address these challenges often required teachers to follow up on their initial

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Table 3
Student engagement with each other’s mathematical ideas: Example teacher and student moves.

Category of move Teacher move Student move

Teacher enacts move Teacher supports student to use move

Asks a general What were you thinking? I want you to share your ideas. Your partner How do you know?
question can say: ‘How do you know that for sure? How Why do you think that?
did you get that?’
Asks a specific How many basketballs did you buy Are you sure about this part (points to Where did you get the 5 from?
question first? 40 × 2)? Can you talk to your neighbor about But what are you going to do with the 16?
how it’s going to work?
Restates/revoices I heard Hannah say that we know Can you talk about the first step these partners So you’re saying that we could do another 4
another’s idea that we need 4 mosquitoes in one took together? Say ‘First, these partners…’ times 12?
hour. Oh yeah, let’s just take away one.
Challenges another’s Should she repeat what she said? Say ‘I’m disagreeing because…’ 600 times anything will be too much.
idea Because some of you might This one has to be wrong.
disagree.
Adds on to another’s I am going to combine Annabelle’s Can you talk about how your idea (that 26 Student 1: Add by 25s?
idea and Daisy’s ideas. times 10 equals 260) will help Jaclyn? Student 2: We could do that, but you know
how 25 plus 25 equals 50? Maybe we could
add the 50 s to go faster.

invitations.
Follow-up teacher support moves. In their follow-up to initial invitations, teachers drew on three categories of support moves:
probing, scaffolding, and positioning. Probing questions typically drew attention to the specific details in a student’s mathematical
idea and encouraged others to engage with those particular details (“Did you understand why she [divided each whole] into five
pieces?”). Such probing questions provided students with a starting point to engage with others’ ideas.
In scaffolding moves, teachers gave specific assistance to help students engage with others’ ideas. In some scaffolding moves, the
teacher herself engaged with a part of a student’s idea and invited other students to add to it. She restated or revoiced something a
student said or did (“What did Julie just say? If we only take away 400, we are only going to be in the what range? The 1000′s range.
That gives us a clue that we haven’t taken away enough yet”; “I heard Hannah say that we know that we need 4 mosquitoes in one
hour”); noted similarities or differences between different students’ ideas (“He landed on something special, wasn’t it? It was an easier
number”); suggested a way to add on to a student’s idea (“Let’s try another strategy that is faster. Could you buy more than 50 in your
first two orders?”). In other scaffolding moves, teachers gave explicit guidance about moves students could carry out to engage with
other students’ ideas. Teachers made explicit suggestions (“Can you ignore the lines and explain his picture?”) or provided con-
versation stems to support student questioning (see Table 3).
In positioning moves, teachers enabled students to see that they could engage with others’ ideas by “positioning” students as
capable participants or “positioning” one student’s idea relative to another student’s idea. The following example demonstrates a
teacher interacting with a student to acknowledge his ability to engage with others’ ideas (and communicated the expectation that he
should do so) and making explicit that there was a connection between his idea and that of another student: “What Aaron’s saying is
that four-fourths is a whole, or one. That’s what he says. What do you, Peter, say to that? … You can explain it. I saw that you did it
that way. Let’s take a look.”
Teachers’ follow-up moves were not a set of fully-planned actions. Instead, teachers drew from a repertoire of moves and se-
quenced and adapted them in response to the nature of student participation that unfolded. Table 4 gives an example of a teacher
supporting students’ engagement with each other’s ideas. After an initial invitation for students to respond to a student’s idea, the
teacher responds with a variety of follow-up moves that involve probing, scaffolding, and positioning, all while focusing on the
central mathematical details underlying the student’s suggestion.

3.3. Integrated model of the relationships among student participation, teacher support of student participation, and student achievement

To simultaneously examine the links among student participation, teacher support of student participation, and student
achievement, we analyzed an integrated quantitative model that used our expanded conceptions of student participation and teacher
practices. That is, the indicator of student participation was a comprehensive measure that included both explaining one’s own
thinking and engaging with others’ ideas. Similarly, the indicator of teacher practice included teacher support of student explaining
and support for students engaging with others’ ideas. Analyses of this quantitative model of the relationships among student par-
ticipation, teacher support of student participation, and student achievement (Ing et al., 2015) revealed an interesting pattern of
linkages. The results (summarized in Fig. 1) show that the importance of teacher support of student participation for student
achievement is not a direct one but is an indirect one through the mediating variable student participation. Moreover, these results
show that both teacher practice and student participation need to be taken into account when predicting student achievement.

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Table 4
An example of teacher support for students’ engagement with each other’s ideas.

Problem: What are different ways to decompose the number 150?

Gerardo 10 times 15
Teacher What do you guys think about that one?
Students Yeah/yes
Teacher Who can prove it?
Karla I don’t know.
Teacher Do you want to ask him?
Karla Can you repeat that, but in an easier way?
Gerardo Like what?
Karla I don’t, like, the 10 times 15? Prove that it’s 150?
Gerardo Cause 10, 20 (holds up a finger for each number counted) 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, (nods), 110, 120, 130, 140, 150
Students Ooh!
Teacher So what was he counting by?
Students Tens!
Teacher How many times?
Students 5!
Students 15!
Teacher Hmmm. Did it equal 150?
Students Yes
Teacher Karla, thanks for asking that question

Fig. 1. Unified model linking teacher support of student participation, student participation, and student achievement. From Educational Studies in Mathematics,
Student Participation in Elementary Mathematics Classrooms: The Missing Link Between Teacher Practices and Student Achievement, 90(3), 2015, p. 350, Ing et al.
Reprinted with permission of Springer.
Note: Numbers on the solid lines are statistically significant (p < 0.05) multilevel standardized regression coefficients (standard errors in parentheses), controlling for
prior achievement. The dotted line indicates a nonsignificant coefficient.

3.4. Work in progress: interaction profiles across multiple classroom participation structures

In the classrooms we have studied, teachers create multiple structures for students to participate, including whole-class discus-
sions, planned student-led small-group collaborative work, and impromptu private student-student conversations that teachers in-
vited during the course of whole-class discussion. Lessons were typically divided into three phases: whole-class warm-up, planned
small-group work, and whole-class share-out (see Fig. 2). The whole-class warm-up phase consisted of discussion of one or more tasks
or problems that the teachers asked students to solve mentally. Some of the student participation occurred in the context of whole-
class discussion, for example, when the teacher asked a student to describe her problem-solving strategy and the teacher then
engaged other students in discussion of that strategy. Other student participation during the warm-up phase occurred during private
conversations within pairs of students, as when the teacher told students to “turn and talk to your neighbor or partner” about “your
ideas for solving the problem” or “an efficient step Marco could do next in his strategy.”

Fig. 2. Multiple participation structures in each lesson.

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In the small-group work phase, students were asked to work together to make sense of, and solve, one or more problems, often
using multiple strategies. Students largely worked independently from the teacher; the teacher circulated among the groups, spending
various amounts of time with the groups.
During the whole-class share-out phase, the class reconvened to discuss strategies generated during small-group work. Selected
students or groups shared their strategies and the teacher supported the class’s engagement with their strategy. As in the warm-up,
the teacher orchestrated conversations with the whole group, and also asked students to turn and talk with their partners about
certain ideas emerging in the solutions being shared.
Much previous research focuses on only one participation structure (e.g., small-group work or whole-class discussion) or com-
bines multiple participation structures without distinguishing between them. The research that produced the model shown in Fig. 1,
for example, combined information about classroom interaction during teacher-led whole-class discussions and planned student-led
small-group collaborative work (and did not consider private student-student conversations). Previous research has rarely in-
vestigated the role of the participation structure in classroom interaction, specifically whether students and teachers may participate
differently across structures and whether any variation that emerges is significant for student outcomes.
Our current work (in progress) is attempting to clarify the role of all of these classroom participation structures for productive
dialogue and the implications for student learning. In particular, the work in progress seeks to address the following questions:

• In what ways do different participation structures offer opportunities for productive student participation?
• How do the nature of student participation and the teacher practices supporting student participation vary across participation
structures?
• How do the profiles of student participation across participation structures–and the teacher practices that support participa-
tion–vary from one student to another?
• What are the ramifications of varying profiles for student learning outcomes?
Preliminary analyses show that all of the participation structures offer opportunities for high-level student participation (e.g.,
providing complete, correct, and fully detailed explanations of how to solve problems; adding details to the mathematical ideas that
others propose). In the classrooms we observed, a substantial portion of high-level student participation occurred during whole-class
discussion (31%) and during private student-student conversations (23%), as well as during planned small-group collaborative work
(44%). The profiles of student participation varied considerably across students, however. Some students (27%) participated most
actively in whole-class discussions, other students (51%) participated most actively in small-group work, some (11%) participated
most actively during private student-student conversations, and others (13%) showed similar levels of participation in multiple
participation structures. Analyses are under way to understand the implications of this variation in student profiles of participation
for student learning, and the teacher practices that are most effective for supporting student participation in the different structures.

3.5. Future directions

The fact that essential student participation occurs in multiple participation structures in the classroom brings forth a number of
further issues needing investigation. First, the nature of student participation—and the teacher practices that support it—may not be
the same in the different structures. For example, how students may add details to other students’ ideas may take different forms
during whole-class discussion, collaborative small-group work, and private student-student conversations. Similarly, the teacher
practices that are most effective for supporting students to add to each other’s ideas may be different in the multiple classroom
structures. Helping teachers productively engage students requires attention to these nuanced possibilities.
Second, much will be gained by exploring more general teacher practices that shape participation in the different classroom
participation structures. Thus far, in the program of research described here, we have opted to capture instructional moves teachers
use during their ongoing interaction with students to encourage students to explain their thinking and engage with others’ ideas. A
fuller understanding of student participation will come from investigating how teachers support and develop norms around parti-
cipation in the different classroom participation structures, as well as opportunities for participation afforded by the mathematics
problems teachers pose and unfold with students.
Third, it is not enough to understand each participation structure in isolation. Students’ mathematical ideas progress and develop
over the course of the lesson as instruction moves from one participation structure to another. Several questions immediately arise:
What kind(s) of student participation across the participation structures will benefit students? How can teachers best support the
kinds of participation that will help students develop their ideas across the participation structures? Addressing these questions will
produce a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between classroom interaction and student outcomes than has been
revealed thus far.
Fourth, the need to attend to multiple participation structures has implications for the measurement of classroom interaction. For
example, large-scale observation measures of classroom interaction, which are often designed to collect information that can be used
to improve teaching effectiveness, typically focus mainly on one participation structure (e.g., whole-class discussion), or may include
multiple structures by following teachers as they interact with students during the lesson. Because a substantial amount of student
interaction may occur in settings without direct involvement of the teacher (e.g., small-group work, private student-student con-
versations), excluding these conversations may produce erroneous pictures of the nature and extent of student participation. The
typical practice of “following the teacher” during observations is likely to produce valid information about the extent of student
participation only in classrooms in which students interact primarily with the teacher. A challenge to the field, then, is to design

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classroom interaction measures that produce comprehensive pictures of interaction of students and teachers.
The program of work described here, from early cooperative group work to our most current work, elucidates the benefit of
attending closely to the details of classroom mathematical interaction. Further attention to the details of classroom mathematical
interaction is critical for designing research that will provide evidence that supports teacher and student learning and enrich our
understanding of them.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support of the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education,
and the Academic Senate, University of California, Los Angeles. The views expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not reflect the
views or policies of the funding agencies. We wish to thank the teachers who contributed their expertise to our research.

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