Attending to and fostering argumentation in whole class discussion

Abstract

Prior studies highlighted the importance of whole class discussion after student activities and have focused, for example, on teacher moves in supporting discussion. We characterize two processes in teacher-students interaction in argumentation discussions: attending to and fostering. These processes describe how student argumentation feeds teacher talk that in turn feeds student argumentation. We analysed video recordings of one whole class 7th grade lesson when students made geometric constructions and engaged in argumentation discussion. We elaborated on four themes in how the teacher talk attended to and fostered student argumentation. We argue that the concepts of attending to and fostering help to understand how teachers can orchestrate argumentation discussions.