ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of an approach to conducting productive discussions in the classroom that student have developed and refined called Quality Talk. It begins with a brief history of Quality Talk and continues with a detailed description of the four core components of the approach. The chapter provides a comprehensive and thorough explanation of each of the main components and, where possible, figures showing classroom materials as well as excerpts from actual classroom discussions. In 2013, P. Karen Murphy was awarded two federally funded grants from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The IES grant focused on developing and refining the intervention in elementary school classrooms; people refer to this project as Quality Talk Language Arts (QTLA). One of the key distinguishing features of Quality Talk is its ardent focus on the nature of talk in small-group classroom discussions and the stringent belief that talk serves an external representation of cognitive processing.
