Adam Lefstein

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · School of Education

This study contributes to growing scholarly interest in teacher-led, school-based learning communities and the characteristics of teacher dialogue and social interaction that support professional learning in these settings. Based on existing conceptual distinctions proposed in the literature, we term this type of teacher dialogue "collaborative inq...

Scholars of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) advocate discussion as a promising instructional method yet rarely specify how such discussions should be conducted. Facilitating classroom discussions is highly challenging, particularly about emotions. Furthermore, the SEL literature contains contradictory discursive imperatives; it typically overlo...

Dialogic pedagogy aims to bring multiple voices and perspectives into conversation , to create a classroom environment inclusive of multiple student identities, and to challenge hegemonic approaches to knowledge. As such, it seems particularly well-suited for interrogating gender binaries and enhancing gender equity. Through micro-ethnographic disc...

Dialogic educators have designed strategies to facilitate dialogic teaching, such as establishing ground rules, employing talk moves, and structuring discussions. Though productive, such strategies rarely open dialogic space, in which shared meaning is created through an interaction that blurs the boundaries between participating voices. Dialogi...

Scholarly efforts to identify core design features for effective teacher professional development have grown rapidly in the last 25 years. Many concise lists of design principles have emerged, most of which converge on a consensus of 5-7 presumably "effective" design features (e.g., collaborative tasks, active learning, focus on content). The proli...

This study examines veteran and novice teachers’ identities in the policy, culture and practice of an Israeli teacher leadership initiative. Building on four years of ethnographic fieldwork, we used discourse analytic methods to investigate references to “veteran” and “novice” teachers in staff meetings, professional development, and interviews. Whi...

Scholars and educators have puzzled for decades about how to provide K-12 teachers with the resources necessary to support and improve teaching. New information and communication technologies have opened up infinitely more possibilities, setting the stage for a renewed discussion about what teaching entails and how best to support it. In this conce...

Taking a socio-cultural perspective on status, this study investigates how teachers' seniority, status, authority and power-relations shape veteran and novice teachers' learning in teacher communities. Applying Goffman's concepts for investigating the interaction order, this case study of a single community focuses on the subtle nuances of discours...

Dialogic pedagogy aims to promote deliberative democratic skills, virtues and practices within an equitable and empowering classroom environment. This article problematizes the practice of setting classroom ground rules in light of dialogic pedagogy’s democratic aspirations. Specifically, we explore the space for dissenting voices within the proces...

This paper uses a case study of an Israeli teacher leadership initiative to explore a mode of educational governance that employs ‘bottom-up’ logic and discourse. The authors analyse the origins of this initiative, and – through a policy-making ethnography of the initiative’s enactment at the district level – show how it is sustained and governed t...

Dialogic pedagogy, in which students and teachers voice thoughts, co‐construct meanings, and generate multiple interpretations of texts, can promote literacy skills and reasoning. Yet, such teaching is challenging and requires, among other changes, adopting dialogic stances. In the language arts, expressive and critical reading stances have been sh...

This paper explores how educational interventions impact the districts they are implemented in above and beyond their intended outcomes. We argue that such unplanned “ripple effects”, in which program elements are recontextualized into other settings, are an important aspect of bringing educational interventions to scale. We analyze these phenomena...

This study examines teachers' justifications for their student sorting decisions in two Israeli secondary schools. Combining descriptive statistics and micro-ethnographic discourse analysis of 281 audio-recorded discussions, the study offers a new perspective on tracking's multiple social and organizational functions: providing students' needs, rew...

One influential way of thinking about teaching is to conceive of it as a clinical profession, similar in important ways to medicine. However, fundamental differences between doctors’ and teachers’ practice limit the usefulness of the medical model. How can we adapt our understandings of clinical practice in light of the unique aspects of teaching a...

Background Research–practice partnerships (RPPs) are proliferating in education, generating increasing interest and posing many challenges. In this study, we shed light on the challenge of supporting practitioners> leadership and building capacity in an RPP. In the RPP literature, practitioner leadership is often highlighted as both a way to improv...

En écho à la notion de best practice largement répandue dans le monde de laformation professionnelle, la contribution illustre les apports et les limites d’uneapproche dialogique de l’apprentissage de la litéracie et l’applique à la formation desenseignants. Elle prend pour exemple une séquence dans laquelle une enseignanteenvisage avec ses élèves...

Most research and practice in teacher in-service learning focuses on formal professional development activities. This article calls for paying greater attention to the informal conversations that are embedded in teachers’ day-to-day work and through which they learn from one another what it means to be a teacher and how to perform their duties. The...

Scholarly interest in dialogic pedagogy and classroom dialogue is multi-disciplinary and draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks. On the positive side, this has produced a rich and varied body of research and evidence. However, in spite of a common interest in educational dialogue and learning through dialogue, cross-disciplinary engagement wi...

Scholars generally agree that teacher professional conversations can play a critical role in teacher learning on the job. However, empirical research on the topic is relatively diffuse, both theoretically and methodologically. This paper presents a systematic review of 64 articles about teacher team discourse and interaction. The review offers an o...

The journal Studia paedagogica is indexed in SCOPUS. The theme of the forthcoming monothematic issue of Studia paedagogica is the changing status of the teaching profession. The aim of the issue is to explore current developments in this field in different countries. Though many education systems around the world are facing similar concerns regardi...

Classroom videos can make instructional practice public, cultivating collaborative, critical teacher discussions. However, video-based learning also involves a risk—the risk of hurting one’s own or a colleague’s public image, or face. In this study, we investigate the role of face threat and face management in teacher professional learning in 16 ca...

This is a copy of my curriculum vitae (CV). I'm happy to share any of the publications; feel free to e-mail me with requests or comments. Thank you for your interest. Adam (alefstein@gmail.com)

Research on dialogic teaching has focused primarily on structural and cognitive dimensions of classroom discourse and interaction, including, for example, teacher questions, student argumentation, sequential structures, and the distribution of participation. For good reason: such aspects are central to most characterizations of dialogic pedagogy, a...

In this brief commentary, Lefstein reflects on the narratives about the purposes of East Asian science education in light of Neil Postman’s The End of Education. He identifies two narratives that dominate the chapters in this book: (a) the global competitiveness story, according to which science and technology education are critical to the developm...

Encouraging and developing voice in the classroom is a key aim of dialogic pedagogy, but teachers’ elicitation of student voices is not always experienced as empowering. This case study investigates a sixth grade literacy lesson discussion about responding to peer group social ostracism. The teacher pressed students to adopt and articulate a stance...

This article is about language corrections in Israeli Hebrew-speaking primary classrooms. The ideological significance of language corrections, particularly within the highly contested context of Israeli society and Modern Hebrew, underlies the current study. Teachers in Israeli, Hebrew-speaking classes were found to frequently correct not only the...

This case study investigates the agency exercised by a teacher team coordinator in shaping the scaffolding she received from her coach while jointly leading teacher team meetings. We used linguistic ethnographic methods to examine 14 teacher meetings. Detailed analysis of four episodes is used to probe the ways in which the coordinator requested, r...

Teaching through controversial, politically charged issues is promoted in Anglo-American democracies as a key means for cultivating active citizenry and democratic values. However, the challenges of discussing controversial issues in the classroom may differ in younger, deeply divided democracies that lack common ground and institutional stability....

Educational discourse is dominated by problematic dichotomies, for example, between teacher- and learner-centred pedagogies, and between teacher control and pupil autonomy. Such dichotomies impede attempts to understand and address complex educational problems, and thwart productive discussion among practitioners and the public. This article examin...

Teachers are increasingly called on to use dialogic teaching practices to engage active pupil participation in academically challenging classroom discourse. Such practices are in tension with commonly held beliefs about pupil ability as fixed and/or context independent. Moreover, teaching practices that seek to make pupil thinking visible can also...

Teachers are increasingly called upon to use dialogic teaching practices to engage active pupil participation in academically challenging classroom discourse. Such practices are in tension with commonly held beliefs about pupil ability as fixed and/or context-independent. Moreover, teaching practices that seek to make pupil thinking visible can als...

Dialogic pedagogy is widely viewed as an excellent means of educating students for civic participation in deliberative democracy. While many intervention-based studies have researched dialogic teaching and learning, we know very little about the enactment of dialogic and related ideas ‘in the wild,’ in regular classrooms. This paper contributes to...

Within current educational discourse, dialogic pedagogy is diametrically opposed to teaching to the test, especially the high stakes standardized test. While dialogic pedagogy is about critical thinking, authenticity and freedom, test preparation evokes all that is narrow, instrumental and cynical in education. In this paper we argue that such posi...

How do cultural and institutional factors interact in shaping preference structures? This paper presents a cross-cultural analysis of disagreements in three different classroom settings: (1) a year 6 (ages 11–12) mainstream class in England, (2) a fifth-grade class of gifted students in the United States, and (3) a fourth-grade mainstream class in...

Representing practice as an object for joint scrutiny is critical for student teacher learning and the development of professional vision. This article examines narrative representations of practice in teaching methods workshops and their affordances and constraints for prospective teacher learning. Three workshops in an Israeli teacher education p...

One approach to dialogic pedagogy focuses on the interplay of voices: Whose voices are expressed and attended to in classroom discourse? And how do these voices play off of one another in creating new ideas and meanings? In particular, to what extent are students empowered to express their own voices, rather than reproducing the teacher or textbook...

What is the appropriate unit of analysis for the study of classroom discourse? One common analytic strategy employs individual discourse moves, which are coded, counted and used as indicators of the quality of classroom talk. In this article we question this practice, arguing that discourse moves are positioned within sequences that critically shap...

This chapter explores the processes of case selection, data analysis, theoretical framing and representation in the move from research data to publication of a research article in a linguistic ethnographic study of classroom discourse and interaction. Over the course of our fieldwork in an East London primary school we observed and video-recorded a...

Academic concepts, methods and research knowledge are often criticised as irrelevant or useless for addressing problems of educational practice. Liat, a full-time Science teacher and part-time Masters student, expressed this sentiment in a recent seminar on ‘Discourse, Teaching and Learning’: ‘I’m four years into this degree [programme] and the aca...

International comparative testing, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has considerable impact on policy-makers, the media and the general public. A central assumption underlying PISA is that global variation in students’ academic performance is attributable to national educational structures and policies. The ai...

This article investigates the problems and paradoxes of attempting to empower teacher voices within the context of an international conference of policy-makers, academic researchers and practitioners. We examine the distribution of talk within a teacher workshop: who spoke, how, and to whom did the group and broader audiences listen? We trace the e...

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class, educati...

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This article investigates five dilemmas that emerge from analysis of a brief episode of classroom practice: issues concerning the design and management of the classroom discussion, the use of drama in teaching, teacher handling of pupil disturbances, and the advantages and drawbacks of competition. We argue that such dilemma-driven analysis is miss...

English education policy-makers have targeted classroom time as a key area for regulation and intervention, with ‘brisk pace’ widely accepted as a feature of good teaching practice. We problematise this conventional wisdom through an exploration of objective and subjective dimensions of lesson pace in a corpus of 30 Key Stage 2 literacy lessons fro...

We estimate that, on average, an English primary teacher poses over 60,000 questions and follows up pupil responses with over 30,000 evaluations in every year of classroom lessons. This talk is shaped by deeply ingrained habits, resulting in part from an estimated 13,000 hours spent as a pupil watching others’ teaching practice (Lortie 1975). Howev...

This article explores the political dimensions of teacher learning, both in theoretical work on teacher professional vision, and in an empirical study of video-based teacher professional development. Theoretically, we revisit the origins of “professional vision” in linguistic anthropology and trace the concept’s evolution in teacher education resea...

This article problematises a broad consensus in favour of importing popular culture into classrooms as a means of engaging pupils, transforming interactional norms and facilitating pupil understanding. A literacy lesson in which an English primary school teacher invoked the televised talent show, X‐factor, in organising the class to provide feedbac...

This is not a book (for some reason that computer-generated erroneous detail can't be changed), but rather a report, which also appeared as working paper #77 in the Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacy (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ldc/publications/workingpapers/77.pdf).

To what extent and in what ways should researchers share their views with research participants during ethnographic fieldwork? This article discusses the author’s experience adopting different communicative stances with respondents in the context of an ethnographic study of the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy in a “failing” prim...

This article traces the trajectory of educational ideas through policy, curricular materials and enactment in the classroom. Specifically, I examine current English policy regarding the teaching of grammar in primary schools, and its enactment in a Year 3 (8-year olds) literacy lesson. While the policy advances a broadly rhetorical approach to gram...

How and why is national policy translated into interactions between teachers and pupils? This article examines the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy (NLS) in a case study of two consecutive Year 6 literacy lessons, which are drawn from a year long ethnographic study of the NLS in one school. Although the teacher taught directly fr...

Background/Context Literacy education has always been hotly contested, and in England the debate has recently intensified in controversies over synthetic phonics teaching and the National Literacy Strategy. This article brings together four theoretical and policy contexts in studying this debate: (1) the long-standing and on-going “reading wars”; (...

Section A: Introduction A1. Why Study Literacy? A2. Organisation of the Book A3. Keywords A4. Encounters with Literacy A5. Academic Study of Literacy - Mapping the Field A5.1 Meanings of 'Literacy' in Different Traditions A5.2 Literacy Acquisition A5.3 Consequences of Literacy A5.4 Literacy as Social Practice A5.5 New Literacies Section B: Extensio...

Patricia D. Irvine and Joanne Larson, "Literacy packages in practice: constructing academic disadvantage", pg. 45 -70 (ch. 4): pg. 58: quoting a first-grade teacher: "I was just afraid to abandon Open Court... Because I've been successful with it. And I do not know if... Maybe if I just did any kind of phonics everyday, that would be the same thing...

This article is about current discourse regarding teaching and its regulation and reform. I argue that underlying most positions in current debates are two competing visions of teaching—one technical and the other personal. Technical teaching is manifested in recent developments in English education—for example, the National Curriculum, National Pr...

This article suggests that failure of progressivist school reforms is due in part to inadequate treatment of the relationship between pedagogy and classroom control. Traditional teaching techniques and disciplinary technologies coincided. Progressivist teaching methods undermined traditional disciplinary structures, without proposing an alternative...

This article suggests that failure of progressivist school reforms is due in part to inadequate treatment of the relationship between pedagogy and classroom control. Traditional teaching techniques and disciplinary technologies coincided. Progressivist teaching methods undermined traditional disciplinary structures, without proposing an alternative...

Twelve Israeli schools created communities of thinking to explore how a pedagogy based on questioning can transform teaching and learning.

In this paper I question the relevance and appropriateness of prevailing ideals of dialogue for educational practice within schools. First, I examine five core aspects common to most theories: dialogue as a communicative pattern, dialogue as a means of learning, dialogue as an epistemological stance, dialogue as an orientation toward content and di...