ABSTRACT
The Next Generation Science Standards challenge educators to provide for three-dimensional learning around disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices. In lieu of more traditional types of professional development, many teachers are joining together in learning groups within and across schools, sometimes including district administration and university faculty. Generative teacher talk makes classroom practices visible with a great degree of transparency argued, “comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for situated action”. Generative teacher talk connects generalized teaching principles to specific contextual experiences. Horn and Little argue that these kinds of connections provide “a means of developing teaching knowledge that is deeply rooted in embodied accounts of classroom life, joining important concepts about teaching to particulars of practice”. Methodologically, the small but growing body of research on teachers’ professional conversations has relied heavily on ex-situ accounts supplied by interviews, surveys, self-report logs, and diaries.
