 So, Accountable Talk is a kind of classroom talk that engages teacher and students in dialogue and it's called Accountable Talk because there are three types of accountabilities. So one of them is accountability to community and what that means is that the talk takes into account what the people in the classroom have said. The second accountability is accountability to knowledge or to accurate knowledge and the point there is that the Accountable Talk is not just about students engaging in discussion about their opinions, it has to be, it has to take into account the knowledge that we know is relevant to the issue and finally it's accountable to reasoning. So the teacher using Accountable Talk encourages the students to use evidence to make arguments that are well structured so there's a focus on using accurate knowledge in rigorous reasoning and paying attention to what has come out of the community so far. But we were very interested in how teachers were able to manage an engaged and meaningful whole class discussion that resulted in learning. So we started to notice what we were calling discourse moves and what that means is or sometimes now we call them talk moves. What that means is there's a certain thing that a teacher will say that positions a student in a particular way and helps the discussion move along. So one example that we noticed early on was called revoicing. So let's say a teacher asks a question and a student says something back and what the student says is kind of unclear or seems wrong and often teachers will say, oh anybody else and we'll just kind of move along and ignore that. Well in this move a teacher might instead say, oh okay wait let me see if I understand what you're saying. What you're saying is such and such is that right? And so they go back to the student and they check is this what you're saying so it's not just repeating what the student says. It involves kind of taking up what they said, kind of repeating it and then saying is that what you mean so that you can kind of clarify. And what that does is it positions the student in a particular way as someone who's reasoning the teacher wants to understand. So we saw that this talk move does several very interesting things. First it gives the teacher another chance to learn about what the student actually means and you know students are unclear about 50% of the time in my opinion. You can't understand what they're saying and this is true whether they're undergraduates or graduate students or third graders you know they're just not very clear. So it gives you a chance to understand what they're saying and this is formative assessment it gives you a sense of where do you go next right so that's one thing. But for the student it gives the student the sense that the teacher wants to understand him or her. And that is very big right that is something that changes the culture of the classroom over time because the students start to think oh she really wants to know what I think and other students see that right and they all start to think oh and this is how they start to become more willing to engage in this kind of dialogue that they feel like well there's somebody at the other end who really wants to understand who's not just judging whether I'm right or wrong. So this positions the student differently they move from being someone who's supposed to you know get the right answer or get the wrong answer to somebody who is supposed to be reasoning. So project challenge was a project that Suzanne Chapin who's a colleague of mine here at BU was the head of and it was a project in which it was a funded project in which we went into Chelsea which is a district in Massachusetts it's one of the lowest performing districts there's very high level of English learners very low income district and the point of the project was to bring challenging mathematics into the district okay for students who were who who had an interest in math there were there were very few students who who in terms of standardized tests would appear to be you know gifted or talented but but Suzanne was convinced that there's just a tremendous amount of potential but you have to bring in more challenging curriculum and instruction. So the component that I was involved in was talk in the classroom and how do you engage students in discussion. And so we did this and after the end of the first year we got results from a nationally normed standardized test and the students in these classes these project challenge classes they had one hour of class per day in math that's it and so at the end of the year the students in these classes were the mean was at the 90th percentile nationally right so the administrators in the school were just shocked and they said well what are you doing here you know so it started to extend and we went to the second year and the third year and the fourth year and we got just tremendously big impacts in terms of not just math but also their performance on English language arts tests so the the talk was sort of building their capacity to reason but also to communicate their reasoning and so both of those things are involved in their performance on tests and I'm not saying that tests are the ultimate criterion you know you the what you're trying to do is prepare students in the elementary grades in the middle school to be ready for high school and to go on to college right this is your goal and so to have them be able to do that kind of reasoning with one another about mathematics just appeared apparently to be very powerful but I I want to make a point about this which is that I sat there during the first year watching these discussions and thinking oh this isn't working you know this is very laborious and this just doesn't seem very you know is this is anything changing I mean they're struggling this is very difficult and so at the end of the year when we got these results we were just shocked you know because it's not like these classrooms where discussion happens look wonderful and everyone understands and the talk is clear and everyone's engaged it doesn't look like that you know it doesn't and I think that's really important to remember because this is this is challenging this is not an easy kind of instruction it's extreme extremely productive extremely valuable but it imposes a lot on teachers and I think we really need to understand that well I think there's several key points that teachers need to keep in mind if they want to use academically productive talk or accountable talk or any of these varieties and one of them I've sort of mentioned already it's that it's quite complex and so don't start out in an overly ambitious way if you can do five minutes of discussion a day that's great you know there's sort of a parallel with exercise here right start out don't kill yourself you know start out do five minutes a day ten minutes a day and your students have to get used to it too right I think for teachers to succeed at using discussion they need to keep in mind these things first they have to believe that kids can do this and not just say they believe there are students can do it they have to believe that their students can do this even if their students are very young children even if their students are English learners even if their students have other kinds of challenges they can participate in this we've seen this over many years that this is a possible thing for students to do they have to establish and reinforce specific norms for productive talk and what I mean by that is they have to think about how can I establish a culture in which students will feel safe doing this right if students are afraid that someone's going to make fun of them or mock them they're just not going to participate and you can't make them they'll just sit there the teacher has to develop facility with these talk tools with these talk moves with these ways of using things like turn and talk or think pair share or all of these all of these tools that people use to to to have discussion proceed in a in a productive way you have to get good at them and that takes time and you have to be patient with yourself and patient with your students it's really important that you have if you're going to have a discussion you have to have a good discussable question to start with and a lot of people minimize this but I think it's just incredibly important and people get better at planning these questions over time this is another thing that you have to get better at right and you have to have planned follow-up questions and what are you going to do with this discussion why are you having this discussion where do you where do you want it to go and and so finally I guess the point is that you need a plan you do need a plan for productive talk you have to think through it ahead of time what are students going to say what are they not going to understand where do you think it's going to help them to go