Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards: Making Room for Dialogue

Language and Literacy

by Bob Fecho (Editor), Michelle M. Falter, Xiaoli Hong

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards.

Book Features:

Examples of teachers using dialogue to engage students, as well as colleagues, administrators, parents, policymakers, and other educational stakeholders. Guidance for teachers in how to differentiate instruction to meet literacy standards. Case studies illustrating how teachers navigate the tension between standardization and student-centered teaching. An exemplary collaborative effort among a university researcher, doctoral students, and high school teachers. The reflections and self-questioning of teachers who write honestly, engagingly, and insightfully about their dialogical practices.

144 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 26, 2015

About the author

Bob Fecho is Professor of English Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA.

Reviews

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I expected more from this. The authors raise great points about advocacy. Their six themes identified in the data are useful. The writing itself could have been better and more focused on the data/framework.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished this after starting it last year. What a cool book! Dialogic Teaching was something that I loved learning about in undergrad, and this book gave little case studies of teachers who were "leaning into the wobble" and bringing dialogue into their classrooms. Very cool!