Michael B. Sherry

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the possibility that whole-class discussions may manifest in particular ways within a discipline, and suggest that "imaginative-entry activities," which invite students to imagine themselves into hypothetical scenarios based on historical events, can promote or discourage wholeclass discussions.

TL;DR: How a focus on dialogic instruction and an adoption of a multiliteracies pedagogy guided the implementation and use of technologies within the project is described.

TL;DR: In many different settings, teachers use personal experience to instruct students as discussed by the authors, from the science lab to the baseball diamond, stories help teachers relate the content they are teaching to lived experience, often taking the form of oral narrative, which, at its simplest, contains two temporal clauses and an evaluation: "I once did it like that, and it blew up. So don't do that!" Although oral teacher narratives are not always simple and formulaic, they are usually structured and sometimes even artful.

Abstract: In this article, we address how websites intended for ELA teachers encourage user participation and what kinds of English education these sites promote or exclude. We selected sites based on assumptions drawn from interactional sociolinguistics as well as additional criteria that developed during our search. Our analysis focuseson the George Lucas Foundation’s Edutopia.org as a central example, as well as five other sites with various similar features. Together, these sites promote a progressive, situated, project-based vision of English teaching, and they may serve as both venues and models for how English teacher educators who share that vision can reach a broader audience.