ARTICLE IN PRESS

Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

Learning through interactive talk: A school-based mentor

teacher study group as a context for professional learning
David Carroll
Western Washington University, 264-D Miller Hall, 516 High St., Bellingham, WA 98225-9090, USA

Abstract
This article reports on a year-long study of collaborative professional learning in a mentor teacher study group
connected to a large university teacher education program. It introduces a theoretical framework for considering the
nature of interactive talk and its relationship to professional learning. Using examples of study group discourse, it then
presents a methodology for analyzing interactive talk and the joint construction of ideas about practice. The article
concludes by describing study group materials and analytic tasks developed from artifacts of practice, and offering an
analysis of leadership and facilitation issues for guiding inquiry-oriented discourse in study group contexts.
r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Mentoring; Teacher study groups; Communities of practice

1. Introduction
During the 199899 school year, a group of ve
teachers from an urban mid-western elementary
school met together regularly with the university
instructor supervising their teacher interns to
investigate their collective experiences with mentoring. Calling themselves the Collaborating Teacher Study Group (CTSG), they examined records
and artifacts of their mentoring experience together and attempted to develop both their
understanding of learning to teach and their
repertoire of practice for mentoring novice teaTel.: +1 360 650 2251.

E-mail address: david.carroll@wwu.edu.

chers. In this article, I present an account of the

group from my perspective as the university
instructor. I describe research I conducted as both
participant/observer and group leader, and outline
a theoretical framework I developed for examining
interactive talk and its relationship to professional
learning in teacher study groups. Using examples
from study group discourse, I illustrate the use of
analytic tools I developed to study interactive talk
and the joint construction of ideas about mentoring practice, and to examine my leadership
moves in guiding study group talk.
Teacher education programs have been encouraged in recent years to devote more attention to
developing partnerships with schools and to helping teachers become better equipped to mentor

0742-051X/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tate.2005.03.005

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

pre-service teacher candidates (National Commission on Teaching and Americas Future, 1996).
Teacher study groups have been recognized
increasingly as one form of professional development potentially capable of engaging teachers in
the inquiry and critical analysis necessary for this
kind of practice-centered professional learning
(Ball & Cohen, 1999; Wilson & Berne, 1999).
However, study groups are not well understood
as contexts for teacher learning (Ball, 1996; Wilson
& Berne, 1999). This is in part due to the inherent
complexity of language and its relationship to
thought.
What exactly are the functions of language in
the classroom or in any situation where we
claim that learning is (or should be) taking
place? Linguists still struggle in their thickly
textured studies of language use to solve the
riddle of the relation between observed language behaviors that come out of the mouth
and mental processes that go on in the
head(Zentella, 1997, quoted in (Heath, 2000).
Attempting to make sense of the relationship
between talk and thinking presents signicant
challenges which researchers are just beginning to
explore (Wilson & Berne, 1999). There is also little
guidance available for those who would lead such
study groups, and the inherent tension between
developing and sustaining inquiry into practice,
while simultaneously promoting professional development around mentoring practice is challenging to negotiate as a group leader.
The analytic tools and the examination of study
group leadership issues presented here are potentially useful in other settings where teacher
educators and researchers are attempting to nd
ways of understanding how to work with teachers
to develop their mentoring practice. Although the
work is exploratory in nature and situated in my
own practice as a teacher educator, it suggests
promising openings for further research and
explorations of practice.
The article begins with a description of the
context for the mentor development project and
study in an urban elementary school associated
with a large mid-western teacher education program. The study group is introduced and ideas

about its operation, leadership, and activities over

the course of the year of the study are presented
briey. The remainder of the paper is in three parts
which use examples from the study group to
explore the relationship between interactive talk
and professional learning. In Part One, I introduce
a theoretical framework for examining the nature
of interactive talk and its relationship to professional learning which I developed inductively in
the course of this work. I use concepts from that
framework to analyze an extended example of
interactive talk from our study group session in
March, after we had been meeting for several
months and the interactive character of talk in the
group had developed considerably. I then present
a taxonomy of interactive speech forms used
recurrently in the study group which had the
effect of introducing an inquiry orientation to the
discourse.
In Part Two, I draw again on the analytic tools
introduced in Part One. I use them to illustrate
how I investigated the joint construction and
collective warranting of ideas in the study group
as it evolved into a genuine community of practice
that promoted participants professional learning.
In Part Three, I address issues of leadership for
inquiry-oriented professional discourse. I analyze
the kinds of materials and analytic tasks we
explored. I consider the range of my own
participation in the group in facilitating inquiry.
I then present three recurrent circumstances in
study group talk which illustrate different aspects
of my participation. To conclude, I summarize
important dilemmas and challenges of leadership
for this kind of collective study group inquiry.

2. Study context
Capitol1 Elementary School, where this study
takes place, is a diverse urban school with nearly
300 students in grades K-5. The time period of this
study was the 199899 school year, the second year
of Capitols participation in the teacher education
program associated with a large mid-western
university. The cluster placement plan featured in
1

The name, Capitol, is a pseudonym.

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473
Table 1
CTSG participants
Teacher

Grade level

Intern

Susan
Pam
Martha
Sandy
Anne

Kindergarten
First grade
First grade
Second grade
Fifth grade

Ben
Karen
Tammy
Megan
Brenda

the teacher education program enabled ve

teacher interns to be placed at Capitol during the
year of the study. I was assigned for 8 h per week
as the university program liaison responsible for
interns supervision at the school.
The CTSG was composed on a voluntary basis
of the ve teachers who chose to work with teacher
interns at Capitol during that year, plus the
principal, John.2 John attended sporadically as
his other duties allowed, although he was an
enthusiastic supporter of the activity. The study
group met for nine 23 h sessions from September
to April. Each session was audio taped and,
beginning in November, video taped as well. Table
1 introduces the study group participants and their
interns.
I had worked with interns at Capitol the
previous year, attended numerous faculty meetings, participated in staff retreats, and generally
learned much about the schools recent history and
the complex social relations which characterize
any small and intense work setting, such as an
elementary school. I was a regular visitor in the
classrooms of study group members as I carried
out my responsibilities related to observing and
conferring with their interns. Thus, my participant
status in both the study group and the wider
school culture privileged my vantage point and
provided important contextual understanding for
interpreting our joint work.
My role in the group, as both colleague and
group leader, was complex and uncertain. Everyone recognized from the way in which the group
was founded at my invitation that we met for the
purpose of promoting professional learning and
that I was the leader, or in essence, the teacher for
2

All personal names are pseudonyms.

459

that effort. As with other teaching situations, that

put me in a dominant power relationship with
other participants (Tom, 1984).
Despite my role as group leader, I was also
particularly interested in fostering what Lord
(1994) has called critical colleagueship among
study group participants, including myself. Could
fellow professional educators come together with
different experiences, background ideas, role
orientations, and commitments, yet genuinely
collaborate around an agenda of joint work and
agree to grapple with each others points of view
not necessarily expecting to change viewpoints,
but willing to take on the challenge? I wanted to
foster the development of a caring and self-critical
professional community. In my mind, I was
striving for what Bruner (1990) has referred to as
critical open-mindedness. Such open-mindedness is at the heart of professional learning. Greene
(1978) refers to this in her emphasis on fostering
wide-awakeness.
If teachers are not critically conscious, if they
are not awake to their own values and commitments (and to the conditions working upon
them), if they are not personally engaged with
their subject matter and with the world around,
I do not see how they can initiate the young into
critical questioning or the moral life.
As group leader I exercised the primary
inuence on what we talked about and how we
organized our talk, although on several occasions I
did defer my plans in lieu of emergent interests in
the group. I also based my plans largely on issues
which arose in the mentoring work of group
participants. From previous experience in study
groups,3 I had a strong preference for focusing our
talk on artifacts of mentoring practice,4 e.g.,
observation texts, videos of teaching or de-brieng
conversations, lesson plans.
I began our rst session by using a written
observation I had created of one teachers lesson
3
As a teacher in Philadelphia, I was a member of the
Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative (Himley & Carini
2000).
4
Ball and Cohen (1999) have since presented an insightful
analysis of the potential of using artifacts in this way as part of
a pedagogy for professional learning in and from practice.

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

which we studied, asking ourselves, What would

be important for a novice to notice about this
teaching?5 We went on to examine a videotape
of a co-planning session in which a mentor
teacher and I worked with her intern to plan a
lesson. Next I created a series of tapes with this
same teacherintern pair showing planning, teaching, and de-brieng after teaching. In each case in
the study group we examined the tapes, often using
a transcript and related lesson plans as well, and
worked together to make sense of what was
happening and what mentoring moves we
observed on the part of the mentor or myself.
Following that series, I taped another series in
which a different mentor carried out the same
pattern of planning, observing teaching, and debrieng.
In the course of analyzing this latter series, study
group members generated a more formal set of
ideas to guide our work with interns for the
coming year. We later called this the Curriculum
for Learning to Teach at Capitol. The experience
of developing the Curriculum, and the teachers
enthusiasm for using it to guide their subsequent
mentoring practice, was a crowning achievement
for our work as a study group that year. The
practices which participants both came to understand and committed themselves to initiating with
interns in the ensuing year represented a signicant
departure from their previous mentoring practice.6
They anticipated taking numerous concrete steps
toward making their teaching practice more
accessible to their interns and playing a more
active role as teacher educators.
Each teacher committed to modeling detailed
lesson and unit planning and to talking that
process through early in the coming year for their
interns. In my mind, and in the minds of other
CTSG participants, the Curriculum represented
the learning we had experienced and the new
understandings we had generated. I was also
5

A more detailed description of these materials is presented in

Part Three.
6
Space limitations preclude providing further evidence for
this claim here, but the original study presented an analysis of
the changes in mentoring practice by one mentor and examined
the connection between study group discourse and elements in
the Curriculum.

struck by the way in which the ideas reected in

the Curriculum seemed to be collectively generated
and endorsed.
I asked teachers about the impact of generating
the Curriculum in individual interviews at the end
of the school year. As Susan put it, Im really
pleased with the draft (Curriculum). It consolidated what weve been struggling with and gives us
a foundation and a basis for our work next year.
Pam emphasized the usefulness of our ideas about
getting the year started: All those beginning
thingsytalking out loud, having conversations
(about the teaching) in front of the kidsygetting
the kids used to that. She felt work on the
curriculum put her in better shape to acknowledge right away that this (her intern) is a person
learning to teach. Sandy suggested going over the
curriculum chart the following September with
new interns and collaborating teachers (CTs). In
speaking of her shifting feelings about our
work, she said, I felt at rst that there was
something wrong with me. (Later) I learnedthe
whole group learned. It nally sunk in.
Anne spoke of how the Curriculum set up
a calendar of mentoring work across the year.
Last year I didnt have that clear an idea and was
sort of sliding into things (Final CT Interviews,
May 1999).
At the time, I assumed that the new understandings we achieved had been signicantly
inuenced by the discourse in our study group,
since that was the context in which the Curriculum
was invented. The challenge for me was to analyze
how study group talk promoted teacher learning
and led to new ideas and commitments about
mentoring practice.

3. Part One: developing a theoretical framework

and analytic tools from examining study group
transcripts
As a study of learning in a teacher study group
which I created and led, this research falls at the
intersection of ethnographic inquiry featuring a
participantobserver, and a professional development intervention situated in the context of my
own practice. I am thus a study group participant,

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a researcher, and a professional development

leader simultaneously. As a participantobserver
in the study group, and as a participant in other
school activities and functions, as opposed to an
outside researcher, I was privy to many layers of
meaning in our talk which would otherwise have
been more obscure. Research data also included
interviews with study group participants near the
beginning and at the end of our work together, as
well as numerous email messages and notes
generated between myself and study group participants in the course of our joint mentoring work
with our interns. That material helped me to
interrogate my own perceptions regarding study
group events and to interpret the meaning of
interactions.
Taking part in the kind of conversation which
emerged over time in the CTSG offered participants an opportunity to join into a process of
thinking with colleagues. Examining the record of
such conversations offers the analyst a vantage
point for studying participants thinking to make
visible how it was inuenced by the conversational
interaction. In the original study, upon which this
article is based, I conducted a systematic examination of study group tapes guided by Erickson
(1982), who advises repeatedly re-visiting audiovisual records to attempt to identify their full
complexity and to recognize the range and
variation among events in the setting and establish
how typical and/or untypical particular types of
events are. The theoretical framework I developed inductively from analyzing study group talk
links Wengers (1998) ideas about learning in
communities of practice with linguistic approaches to studying conversation and discussion
developed by Goodwin (1990), OConnor and
Michaels (1993, 1996), and Edelsky (1993).
According to Wenger, communities of practice
occur spontaneously when people carry on their
lives and participate with others in making sense of
their experience. He sees this as a human predisposition and a corner stone of his socio-cultural
learning theory. In communities of practice where
people are engaged in ongoing learning and not
simply stuck in their ways, individuals negotiate
meaning through a combination of participating in
joint experience (practice) and representing

461

(reifying) the sense they are making to others

(Wenger, 1998). They may do this through a
combination of action and talk that they share
whether cooking or gardening, or auto mechanics
or whatever, depending upon the nature of the
practice. Study group participants formed a
community of practice in which they were engaged
in joint experience that entailed both direct
engagement in mentoring and talk about such
practices in study group sessions. Interactive talk
was the means for negotiating and representing
meaning in study group sessions. Creating the
Curriculum involved negotiating and representing
meaning.
To better understand what was happening in the
process of negotiating meaning and representing
it to others through interactive talk in the CTSG, I
turned to ideas from conversation analysis. Goodwin (1990) used the construct of participant
frameworks to investigate how children playing
on the streets used talk to align each other in
relation to claims about previous actions or
statements. These informal conversations often
involved a combination of teasing and asserting
status (he said she saidy) whereby children
positioned themselves and others in relationships
and reported actions. OConnor and Michaels
(1993, 1996) used this construct to apply to the
more formal conversation format of a classroom
discussion in which teachers were aligning students comments in relation to curriculum concepts (e.g., John said ___; what do you think?).
They used the term re-voicing strategies which
emphasizes the pedagogical use of the concept in
their context. In my data analysis, I noticed that
CTSG participants also used talk that resembled
the re-voicing moves OConnor and Michaels
examined, although it was not employed with
deliberate pedagogical intentions. Participants
made connections between ideas discussed in one
session and another or related different episodes of
mentoring to each other and implicitly invited
colleagues to agree with or offer counter explanations for the conjectures being presented. These
forms of talk seemed to introduce an inquiry
element to the discourse based on the way they
invited others to move beyond the immediate
description of particular circumstances to connect

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

them to other examples, or consider them

from new perspectives, or in light of larger
ideas or principles, or in terms of underlying
assumptions.
One nal element of the theoretical framework I
developed comes from Edelskys notion of the
collaborative oor in conversations. She denes
the oor as the acknowledged whats-going-on
within a psychological time/space (Edelsky,
1993). I noticed that certain episodes of study
group talk which seemed to result in signicant
and widely endorsed ideas grew out of conversational interactions where the topic or oor of
the conversation was constructed jointly by two or
more individuals engaged in sustained conversation featuring several speaking turns by different
participants.
This theoretical framework can be summarized
as follows:
The CTSG was a Community of Practice in
which participants engaged directly in individual and joint experiences of mentoring their
interns and came together in study group
sessions for talk about that practice.
Interactive Talk occurred in the CTSG when
participants attempted to negotiate and represent the meaning of joint experience through
engaged participation in conversation.
Participant Frameworks are episodes of interactive talk in which negotiating and representing meaning through talk occurred. They
happened both spontaneously and deliberately
in conversation. They had the effect of aligning
individuals and ideas (content) under study.
Re-voicing Moves are recurrent forms of participant frameworks that emerged over time in
the semi-formal deliberative context of the
study group. They conveyed a speakers efforts
to negotiate and represent the meaning of joint
experience and to align others with that
interpretation or invite a contrasting one.
They introduced an inquiry dimension to the
talk.
A Collaborative Conversation Floor occurred
when participants used re-voicing moves to
jointly develop a oor or topic in the conversation around a common idea.

3.1. Illustrating interactive talk from the study

group
The excerpt in Table 2 from the 3/25 CTSG
session can be used to illustrate this conceptual
framework. At that time we were summarizing and
consolidating important insights developed from
the joint study of our mentoring practice. The
background for this discussion stems from recognizing that the experienced teachers practice can
become a central context for the novices learning.
At rst glance, it may seem obvious that novice
teachers would learn a great deal from observing
an experienced teacher day in and day out.
However, many interns do not necessarily notice
what is signicant and cannot easily get inside
the complex life of a classroom without assistance
(Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985). Interns and
other novices do not always see what we want
them to see in classrooms. They also cannot easily
tell what an experienced teacher is thinking about
her teaching as it unfolds in the classroom, and
what on-the-spot decisions she is making to adapt
her plans to the situation (Jackson, 1968). They
may also have difculty framing questions about
what they see because the range of activities and
details can be overwhelming. CTs at Capitol came
to appreciate these difculties over the year and
their conversation illustrates how they learned to
take both practical and intellectual steps to open
up their teaching to their interns. Using the
conceptual framework to analyze this conversation will reveal the dynamics of interactive talk
and its relationship to professional learning.

3.2. Interactive talk and participant frameworks

In Table 2, we see that as Pam, Anne, and later
Susan join into the conversation their statements
are both an occasion for thinking and a reection
of the thinking each is doing. Wenger (1998) refers
to this kind of interaction as negotiating meaning while participating in a community of
practice. Our discussion at this time was initiated
by two guiding questions: What do interns need
to know and be able to do? and What can we do
to support their learning?

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463

Table 2
An illustration of interactive talk
CTSG 3/25 transcript
Pam:
I mean the rst thing that comes to my mind was observationywhen they come in and theyre rst observingyhow to
structure that soyand I think that to some degree theyre not going to be watching everything we want them to because
theyre not there yet but what kind of guidelines can we give them so theyll notice whats important?
Anne:
One thing that worked really well for me last year with Kevin but did not work well this yearywasyhe and I spent quite
a lot of time where I was thinking out loud and going through my planning and saying how does this sound and he would
bounce an idea off of me and I off of him and he entered into considering the ideasyof course at that point in time the
decision was mineybut he had a chance to see that thinking out loud process and we did that a lot.
So, instead of my just sitting there and doing what I normally doyI did it in front of himyand we sort of talked as we
went along, collecting ideasythrowing out ideasyI did it all orally essentially and went through the step by step process
of planningyand he was participating in a way tooyhe came up with some ideas and he experienced that processy
Now that was not happening this year.
Pam:
Why do you think it didnt happen this year?
Anne:
Well, with Brendas situationyshe didnt have timeyshe had to get out of hereyit just didnt worky. but I think it
would have made for better planning later if wed gone through that period because she would have gotten a better idea
of how
Susan:
I did a lot of what Anne was describingyconstantly talking out loudytalking through what we were going to do and
whyy
Anne:
And did he takeydid she take notesyKevin last year took notes through all thatyand I said to himyjot down
questions and then after school thats what we didywe went backyhe kind of de-briefed me
Pam:
I like that
Susan:
I think thats an important piece
Pam:
Karen did that and I think we did that sort of thing for someyI dont know about Megan or Tammy?
Susan:
Ben did that sort of thing when he came inybut to have them write down questionsy
Pam:
Or us, asking themywhy do you think I did this instead of this? I mean if theyre not being ableymaybe thats the rst
checkpoint we should haveyif theyre not able to come up with observations and insightsywell why did you decide to
do this instead of thisythen we need to be asking them why

Pam introduces the topic of observation by

interns at the beginning of the school year. She
offers both a conjecture about interns as learnersI think to some degree theyre not going to
be watching everything we want them toyand
an implicit inference about mentoring practice
that CTs will need to structure interns experience
by providing guidelines to help them notice
whats important. By ending her comments with
the question, what kind of guidelines can we give
themy, Pams remarks engage others in considering the content of what she has said and in
aligning themselves in relation to it. This is an
example of what Goodwin (1990) refers to as a
participant framework, effectively opening up
the next turn in the discussion to someone who will
respond to that invitation. The participant framework invoked by Pams comment has the effect of
inviting others participating in the discussion to

consider her conjecture and implicit suggestion

about practice, thus engaging them in thinking
about these ideas.
3.3. Developing a collaborative floor in the
discussion
Following Pams opening remark, we see how
Anne responds to the participant framework
invoked by Pams invitation. She describes an
approach to mentoring she developed the previous
year with her intern, Kevin, whereby she instituted
a regular after school de-brieng time to help him
understand her teaching. By putting these ideas on
the table, Anne is herself invoking a participant
framework. She is engaging other participants in
considering a specic example about mentoring
practice and, in so doing, she is clarifying and
articulating a powerful underlying principle about

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

mentoring. She describes it as a process of

thinking out loud. This latter idea is an example
of how certain kinds of interactive talk have an
inquiry content based on the way they invite others
to consider experience in light of larger ideas or
principles, or in terms of underlying assumptions.
By calling her activity thinking out loud, Anne
is highlighting the educational signicance of her
action as a mentor and conceptualizing it in
relation to a broader principle of mentoring
practice.
In response to Pams probing, Anne reveals that
this de-brieng time has not worked so well this
year because her current intern, Brenda, is unable
to spend such expansive time with her after school.
As this series of talking turns unfolds, we also see
the development of what Edelsky (1993) calls a
collaborative oor in the discussion. Each successive speaker is contributing to an evolving idea or
common topic about helping interns learn from
observing teaching. Conversations do not always
develop in this way in general or in the CTSG.
People do not necessarily make sense of and build
upon one anothers ideas. They do not necessarily
ask each other clarifying or probing questions, as
Pam did in this instance, to elicit further description of an idea and negotiate its meaning. When
they do work collaboratively, however, and when
they invoke participant frameworks that bring an
inquiry orientation to the unfolding talk, participants in interactive talk have the potential of
constructing joint knowledge, as we will see in
Section 3.4.
3.4. A collective warrant for particular mentoring
practices emerges
Susan echoes Annes enthusiasm for the kind of
thinking out loud she has described. Anne
counters with a question to emphasize the
importance she places on having the intern write
down notes during such conferences. Susan and
Pam endorse this additional detail. Pam concludes
the interchange with the idea that on some
occasions it is important for the teacher to ask
the intern directly about his or her observations or
thinking if they are unable to come up with
questions and observations on their own.

The idea of thinking out loud is a basic

strategy for helping a novice learn in the context of
an experienced teachers practice, whether it be in
the context of planning, teaching, or reecting
after teaching. Unless the experienced teacher
takes deliberate steps to reveal her thinking to
the novice, important aspects of the decisionmaking and other intellectual work involved in
these fundamental tasks of teaching remain
invisible to the novice (Tomlinson, 1995). Anne
and Susan were introduced to thinking out loud
the previous year when I worked with them with
their rst interns.
Now, with Annes anecdote, Susan is struck by
the additional idea of having the intern write
down questions. For Susan, that phrase had
come to have special meaning across the year. One
of the insights she had learned in the process of
helping her intern, Ben, in previous months, was to
insist that he articulate his own response to their
conversations, including putting essential elements
in writing so she could see what sense he was
actually making of their conversations.
In conjunction with this writing down questions strategy, Pam also introduces the idea that
there should be checkpoints to clarify our joint
expectations and to alert CTs and myself to
potential concerns about interns learning. The
idea of having the intern write down questions,
and coining the term checkpoints emerges at the
end of this extended collaborative oor in the
discussion. This term is used to describe the
emerging understanding among teachers that they
needed to take an active role in assessing interns
learning as part of their mentoring practice.
3.5. Interactive talk and joint knowledge
construction
In this one example, we see how three individuals participating in interactive talk engaged each
other in new thinking and joint knowledge
construction. While their conversation evolved
spontaneously at the time, we can re-visit it using
the analytic tools of the conceptual framework for
understanding interactive talk to make visible how
study group discourse inuenced their professional
learning. The initial idea of thinking out loud

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

became articulated in a series of related practical

mentoring moves as they developed a collaborative oor in their conversation. These moves
included literally talking through ones thinking,
having the intern keep notes of out-loud talking,
signaling the intern through eye contact while
teaching, and occasionally asking questions or
having the intern write down questions to test his/
her understanding of the teachers thinking.
By applying the participant frameworks construct to the analysis of in this interactive talk, we
can make visible how three individuals engaged
each other in inquiry-related tasks associated with
the intellectual work of teaching. These tasks
included identifying underlying principles and
central features of learning experiences, re-cycling
ideas from earlier experiences with practice to
contribute to new contexts, and generating mutually warranted norms and expectations for a
common practice of mentoring. In short, they have
constructed joint knowledge about mentoring
practice.
3.6. Forms of interactive talk: re-voicing moves
I further rened my analysis by examining study
group sessions from across the year and identied
the following ve related forms of interactive talk
in the transcripts which I refer to collectively as
re-voicing moves.7 These moves functioned as
participant frameworks in the way they focused
attention in the group on ideas about mentoring
and implicated participants conversationally in
agreeing or disagreeing with them or offering
additional viewpoints. Re-voicing moves typically
had the effect of introducing an inquiry perspective into our study group talk as speakers used
them to engage others in considering ideas from
different perspectives.




Re-stating: Repeating an idea to invite additional attention or concurrence.

Re-cycling: Re-introducing an idea from earlier

7
The idea of re-voicing moves in general comes from
OConnor and Michaels, (1993). The additional variations (restating, re-conceptualizing, re-contextualizing, and re-cycling
are inspired by ideas in Cazden (1988).





465

in the session to position it in relation to a

current observation.
Re-conceptualizing: Developing or broadening
an example into a more general idea.
Re-contextualizing: Shifting the perspectives
brought to bear on it.
Making a warranted inference:8 To make an
inference based on the previous speakers
comment and implicitly invite concurrence or
disagreement.

While the participant framework construct

allows for the close analysis of particular speech
episodes, it also provides an analytic framework
for examining a series of discussions among a
group of colleagues over time. This is because
individuals who come together regularly for
discussion build a common repertoire of participant frameworks, such as the re-voicing moves
described above, which they apply recurrently,
although selectively and responsively, in different
contexts. I identied this taxonomy of re-voicing
moves inductively by analyzing study group
transcripts after the fact. Then, by examining to
what extent and under what circumstances CTSG
participants engaged in re-voicing moves across
CTSG sessions I tracked the development of
inquiry-oriented talk over time. To do this, I
constructed a representative set of detailed transcript excerpts which reected the talk across all
study group sessions.9 I then tracked the presence
and frequency of re-voicing moves across the year.
In Section 4, I will use the theoretical framework
presented here to further examine the way in which
certain episodes of group talk, such as the example
8
In a warranted inference, the speaker is linking his/her
utterance to that of the previous speaker and is making an
inference that she believes to be warranted based on the
previous utterance (OConnor & Michaels, 1993).
9
To prepare this representative set of transcript excerpts, I
reviewed entire transcripts for seven of the nine sessions. For
one session the recording equipment failed. One session was not
transcribed due to its similarity to the preceding session. To
choose excerpts I rst eliminated administrative or business
talk. Next I categorized talk into times when we were examining
artifacts of teaching versus sharing more informal accounts of
mentoring experience. I then chose samples of each of those
kinds of talk attempting to collect the fullest possible range of
interchanges.

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

in Table 2, featured the collaborative construction

of a common topic or idea (Edelsky, 1993) about
mentoring. Subsequent references to such ideas, in
which participants engaged each other in interactive talk featuring the kinds of re-voicing moves
described above, and constructed collaborative
oors in their conversation, fostered a collective
warranting process by which emerging ideas
gained credibility in the group. This capacity to
serve as a seed bed for the joint construction and
mutual endorsement of ideas about practice seems
to be an important potential of such study groups,
and a dening feature of professional communities
of practice. The concepts for understanding
interactive talk presented here will serve as analytic
tools for linking interactive talk and the development of a professional community of practice in
Section 4.

4. Part Two: using analytic tools to investigate the

joint construction and collective warranting of ideas
in forming a professional community of practice
4.1. Locating a key moment in study group talk
I developed my analysis of the joint construction
of ideas in the study group after sensing a critical
moment in the study group session at which we
generated a plan to create the Curriculum for
Learning to Teach at Capitol. This key moment
occurred on March 9, our seventh session, when
Susan presented video and text documentation of
her work with her intern, Ben, about planning and
teaching a unit on transportation in her kindergarten classroom. We realized that there were
basic ideas about planning which Ben only came to
understand in the fth month of his internship
with Susans assistance on this unit. Martha then
suggested that there must be things which we could
collectively do nearer the beginning of the school
year to help interns get a better start on learning to
plan. Susan later nudged us toward action, saying
Well I think maybe something for us to work on
for next year is coming up with some of those key
things for us to work on as CTsy We drafted the
Curriculum on chart paper at our next session,

drawing upon insights generated from our study

group sessions across the year to that point.
4.2. Pursuing a conjecture about the collaborative
construction of our talk
In examining the talk around that critical idea
on March 9, I developed a conjecture that the
points in the discussion which featured signicant
insights or recommendations for ourselves seemed
to occur in conjunction with a collaborative
construction of the focus or oor of our
conversation. Our discussion seemed to take
off from an observation by Pam about Ben as a
learner. Partly with Marthas input, we began to
talk about what interns needed to bring to the
table in preparation for planning, and what we
needed to do to help them. The content of this
episode represented important ideas about mentoring associated both with considering interns as
learners and assuming a more active role as
teacher educators. I wanted to know more about
how these ideas arose at that point in that session,
and what it was about the character of our talk
which fostered the joint construction of those
ideas. It seemed that inquiry in a group setting
would require, to some extent, the collaborative
construction of the oor of the conversation, so I
focused my analysis in particular on that aspect of
our talk.
Edelsky (1993) has studied the collaborative
construction of the oor in professional conversations among colleagues and developed ideas which
were useful in considering how talk developed in
the CTSG. To pursue my analysis systematically, I
used the same set of transcript excerpts I had
previously prepared. I catalogued the topics of
these conversations to generate generic categories
of the kinds of mentoring content represented in
the transcripts. That would enable me to examine
how re-voicing moves were used to align participants around mentoring content in interactive
talk. I deliberately framed these descriptions in
language related to the conception of educative
mentoring (Feiman-Nemser, 1996) which
matched the inquiry orientation toward mentoring
practice which I had been hoping to foster among
CTSG participants. According to Feiman-Nemser,

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

those who assume the practice of educative

mentoring:







think about mentoring as a form of teaching

and take on an educative role,
see novices as learners and attend to how they
think and what they believe and to their ways of
making sense of experience,
focus novices attention on pupils thinking and
sense making,
have a vision of good teaching,
have a theory of learning to teach and a
repertoire of mentoring moves.

I wanted to note when talk with this kind of

mentoring content occurred in the study group. I
saw identifying the mentoring content of our talk
as a crucial element in determining how and what
people had the opportunity to learn in the study
group. In order to bring as much consistency and
rigor as possible into the analysis, I searched for
the widest array of comments which exemplied
the educative mentoring framework to develop a
catalog of mentoring content present in the
transcripts. The list below summarizes the kinds
of mentoring content I found in analyzing the set
of transcripts from across the year.









Identifying and articulating elements of a vision

of good teaching as represented in observations
and descriptions of artifacts of teaching or
elements of that practice.
Identifying ways for CTs/liaison to help interns
notice and learn to analyze elements of good
teaching.
Drawing pedagogical implications of interns
actions as represented in observations and
descriptions of artifacts of interns practice or
descriptions of interns actions.
Sharing ideas about pedagogical conversations
with interns.
Analyzing mentoring moves as represented in
observations and descriptions of teachers/liaisons practice.
Making observations or conjectures or inferences about interns as learners.
Making observations or conjectures or inferences about learning to teach.

467

I also examined the transcript set for evidence of

re-voicing moves. I wanted to explore how these
forms of interactive talk may have helped achieve
what OConnor and Michaels described as the
alignment of participants in relation to each other
and the propositional (mentoring) content of the
talk. In the course of that analysis, I also found
numerous examples of participants making what
OConnor and Michaels (1993) described as
warranted inferences. This combination of revoicing moves, conjectures, and inferences seemed
to me to offer a way of describing what made up
the inquiry orientation of our talk and of
determining its presence or absence at any given
point in the talk. Concurring with OConnor and
Michaels, I thought it should also be the case that
when CTSG participants engaged each other in
talk with a mentoring content, and used the kinds
of inquiry-oriented speech moves listed above,
they should experience opportunities for learning
about mentoring.

4.3. Linking re-voicing moves and joint floors to

analyze the joint construction and collective
warranting of ideas
With these analytic tools in hand, I conducted
another analysis of the set of study group
transcripts, beginning with breaking the talk into
segments representing shifts in the oor or
topic. Next I catalogued the presence of mentoring
content and re-voicing moves or other inquiryoriented speaking turns. Finally, drawing upon
Edelskys notion of a joint oor, I looked for
occasions when the topic or idea around which our
talk was focused seemed to be jointly developed. I
had a hunch that a basic aspect of generating the
Curriculum had to do with the way in which the
ideas were collectively warranted, and not just
endorsed by one teacher and myself. Therefore, I
looked for occasions when two or more individuals (not counting myself) exchanged four or
more substantive talking turns around a common
oor or topic about mentoring and which included
an inquiry orientation according to the way I had
characterized re-voicing moves inductively from
the transcripts.

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

In my analysis of seven of the nine10 study group

sessions, I found 38 such episodes of extended,
jointly constructed, and collectively warranted
ideas about mentoring practice. I next went back
to the Curriculum to see how many of them ended
up in its text. I found that virtually every idea was
represented in the Curriculum, and that those
ideas were essentially what the Curriculum consisted of. Considering that the Curriculum was
drafted at one session without any detailed
examination of records from past sessions, and it
represented participants understandings and aspirations at that time about their mentoring
practice, it seems plausible to conclude that the
jointly constructed and warranted ideas took
special root in the landscape of their learning
across the year. Those were the ideas which stuck
and proved most powerful for them.
The development and implementation of the
Curriculum for Learning to Teach at Capitol
represented a performance test(Perkins, 1998) for
the kinds of new understandings about mentoring
practice which CTSG participants constructed
together. Their mentoring changed as their understanding of learning to teach and using their
practice to scaffold their interns learning developed. They took on increased responsibility for
actions like demonstrating their own planning in
detail and creating checkpoints for assessing
their interns progress. The conceptual framework
for understanding interactive talk enabled me to
make visible analytically how their learning
occurred through the joint construction and
collaborative warranting of ideas over time in the
study group. This process also transformed the
study group itself from a gathering of mentor
teachers into a seedbed for ongoing learning as a
professional community of practice.

professional learning, to analyzing the kinds of

leadership moves I made to enable such learning
through collective inquiry-oriented talk. I begin by
summarizing and analyzing the range of materials
and associated learning tasks I generated for study
group sessions. Next I examine the range of my
own participation in the study group and consider
my role in fostering inquiry-oriented discourse. I
present three recurrent circumstances in study
group talk and give examples of my participation
in them. Finally, I summarize the interactive and
dynamic demands of leadership for this kind of
collective study group inquiry.
5.1. Developing materials of practice and learning
tasks for the study group

In this section, I shift perspective from examining how participants engaged in talk which led to

A fundamental aspect of initiating and facilitating the kind of inquiry-oriented talk about practice
which occurred in the CTSG involved generating
materials of practice and analytic tasks for
investigating them. One way I approached this
territory of designing materials and tasks to
support mentor teachers learning about mentoring was to link tasks of mentoring with fundamental tasks of teaching.11 An inherent idea in
educative mentoring is that the mentoring relationship is situated in joint practice between
mentor and novice. Mentors need to develop their
capacity to model and talk about the key tasks of
teaching. For example, if a key task of teaching
involves planning for instruction, the mentors
work begins with co-planning with the novice
around the mentors own teaching. By modeling
and thinking out loud the mentor helps the novice
learn about aspects of planning such as getting a
deep understanding of the subject matter, exploring resources, planning appropriate learning activities, considering students prior knowledge and
experiences with the topic, and considering how to
assess students learning. As the novices learning
progresses, the context for this joint work gradually shifts from the mentors teaching to the
novices. In similar fashion, the mentor introduces
the novice to other key tasks of teaching, in each

10
One session was not transcribed; the recording equipment
malfunctioned in the other.

11
For this idea I am indebted to my colleague and mentor,
Sharon Feiman-Nemser.

5. Part Three: leadership for inquiry-oriented

professional discourse

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

case beginning with the joint work situated in the

mentors own practice.
I began the year with no specic design for how
we would use our study group sessions. I simply
felt intuitively that I needed to look for opportunities to capture important aspects of the work of
mentoring in text or videotape so that we could
study it in the group. My rst opportunity came as
I was observing one mentor (Sandy) teach a lesson
with her intern (Megan) sitting beside me. Later, I
interviewed Megan about what she had
noticed. This activity, which we called co-observing, was designed to get access to what the
intern was noticing and thus point her mentor
teacher and me toward ways of enlarging her
perspective. To use this experience in our
study group, I generated a written text of my
observation of Sandy and summarized my interview with Megan. The teachers and I rst
examined the observation of Sandys teaching to
identify things we felt would be important for an
intern to notice, then we contrasted that with what
Megan had attended to. This simple comparison
worked well to alert us to how interns perceptions
differed from those of experienced teachers and
helped us begin to inquire into their perspectives as
learners.
As the year unfolded, I particularly focused on
the activities of planning and instruction in
generating artifacts. These tasks emerged as major
challenges for several interns and I sought out
opportunities to document different aspects of
them. I participated in, recorded, and transcribed a
co-planning session with Sandy and Megan in
December. Later in January and February I
videotaped another planning session with that
pair, and then videotaped Megans teaching. I
later documented a similar series between Susan
and her intern, Ben. In the study group, our typical
task was to study the artifacts in detail to make
sense of what was going on in these mentoring
interactionswhat work were we doing as mentors; what sense was the intern making?
In this way, we generated all of the materials we
used in the study group. As Ball and Cohen (1999)
advise in their proposal for a pedagogy for
professional development, the materials we focused on were grounded in the activities of

469

practice and provided us with opportunities to

investigate and construct knowledge central to
teaching (or in our case, mentoring). I also came
to realize that by joining with other participants in
examining my own practice and making it available in the form of artifacts, the contrast between
my own approach to mentoring and that of
different teachers provided a considerable range
of perspectives.
For example, I videotaped my own conversation
with Megan after teaching the unit she and Sandy
and I had co-planned. In the study group, we
analyzed that conversation and the moves I
made and how Megan responded. This helped
Sandy begin to see some new ways of engaging
Megan in conversation about her teaching, particularly in regard to drawing out her thinking
about the choices she had made in teaching. In
analyzing records of my work, however, I was
careful not to set it up as an example of best
practice. On the contrary, I typically made
specic criticisms of my own practice in the group
to invite others to do the same. This did not
require dissembling on my part. I began the year
with a considerably underdeveloped understanding of how interns learn to plan. In working with
various interns, I made numerous missteps and
miscalculations, yet I also learned in the company
of my CTSG colleagues. By joining in the
examination of practice as a colleague with other
participants, and by publicly recognizing myself as
a learner in reecting on uncertainties about my
own practice, I was able to make my practice one
of the contexts for our collective learning, without
setting it up as a normative model.

5.2. Analyzing my participation in the CTSG as

study group leader
In considering leadership issues in the CTSG, it
is also useful to examine the range of my
participation in CTSG sessions. My participation
reects the fact that I chose to engage in the study
group as both a participant and discussion
facilitator. This is an essential element of the kind
of leadership role I constructed for myself, and will
play a part in the subsequent analysis.

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Before proceeding with that analysis, however,

it is important to consider another important
dimension of the CTSG as a context for exploring
discourse which fosters inquiry. In comparison
with some other teacher study groups reported in
the literature (Philadelphia Teachers Learning
Cooperative, 1984; Cochran Smith, 1993; Featherstone & Pfeiffer, 1996), the CTSG was just
venturing into the territory of inquiry, even by
years end. Participants in this study group had not
gone out of their way to nd a teacher study group
focused on inquiring into mentoring. Instead they
graciously accepted an invitation to do something
they had little previous awareness of. While we
constructed important joint insights from our
efforts, this is essentially an account of getting
the disposition toward and the capacity for
collective inquiry underway. Traditional school
culture rarely prepares teachers to value the
usefulness or validity of collective inquiry among
practitioners. Their experiences with professional
development have prepared most teachers to see
knowledge as something that comes from outside,
not something constructed jointly in and around
their practice (Cochran Smith, 1993; Little, 1993).
While in recent years, many teachers have taken
bold steps to break out of these epistemological
fetters, most teachers have not, including those in
the CTSG as it began. It is from that broader
standpoint that I believe that my leadership role in
the CTSG was most necessary. No doubt, other
important dimensions of the relationship between
discourse and inquiry, and different aspects of
leadership would come into play in a group with
more experience with and commitment to inquiry
over time.
Earlier in the article I presented an analysis of
the way in which participant frameworks were
invoked in the CTSG in the course of interactive
talk, resulting under certain circumstances in
inquiry-oriented talk about mentoring and the
joint construction of ideas about mentoring
practice. Now I want to re-visit the context of
that analysis and examine my role in promoting
inquiry in CTSG sessions.
To do that, I reviewed a set of transcripts
representative of our whole series of sessions,
collecting and analyzing my own contributions to

the discourse to characterize those contributions in

a similar way to that presented in analyzing other
participants talk described previously. I noted a
high frequency of re-voicing moves on my part,
as well as a pattern of making conjectures or
inferences. In addition, there are several occasions
when I modeled basic inquiry processes such as
grounding comments in evidence, and inviting
elaboration, and conjectures from others. These
were important dimensions of my role as group
participant.
To consider more specically how my leadership
of CTSG discourse fostered inquiry, I will examine
three kinds of recurrent roles which I played: (1)
facilitating analytic tasks, (2) thinking out loud
about my own mentoring moves, and (3) posing
tasks to consolidate learning.

5.3. Facilitating analytic tasks

Most typical of my role was simply creating and
facilitating analytic tasks around artifacts or
accounts of mentoring practice. I frequently
directed study group participants attention to
particular portions of artifacts, whether in text or
video form. In the work just described with Sandy
and Megan, I invited group members to study our
co-planning conversation and make conjectures
about what we seemed to be doing at various
points in the conversation. This was not done from
the standpoint of getting them to nd answers
which I had pre-determined. Rather, it was a
genuine effort to make collective sense of what we
observed in the artifacts. At other times, I invited
them to consider what sense Megan seemed to be
making and how that was evident in the artifact. I
directed our collective attention in these ways,
using the analytic task of interpreting our mentoring moves. I was able to position study group
participants in relation to ideas about mentoring
that arose among us in the course of our study and
to invite them to articulate what sense they were
making for each other. Guiding the analysis of the
artifacts in this way enabled me to use my
comments to encourage others to articulate
some of the key ideas and principles implied by
our talk.

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

5.4. Thinking out loud

A second recurrent role that the joint analysis of
an artifact or account of my own mentoring
practice allowed me to play was to offer further
interpretation of my own movesto think out
loud myself. On occasions when we were studying
artifacts that featured my own mentoring practice,
I would sometimes make use of the same thinking
out loud idea which we had developed for CTs to
use with interns, but employ it to reveal my
thinking as a mentor. In that sense, I was
thinking out loud with them to explain the
thinking behind my words as they appeared in the
transcript of the planning session. As described
earlier, this kind of move also enabled me to
introduce new or contrasting perspectives about
mentoring to the group, such as taking steps to
draw out interns thinking about their choices in
planning or teaching.

5.5. Posing tasks to consolidate learning

A third role which I played frequently was to
pose a particular task to pull together or consolidate ideas emerging from our conversation at a
given point in a study group session. For example,
after we analyzed the transcript of the co-planning
session among Megan, Sandy, and myself, I felt
that we had just come to some tentative collective
insights about interns needs in learning to plan,
and I wanted to consolidate them more deliberately, lest they be forgotten. Accordingly, I asked
people at that point to try to articulate what I
called a curriculum for learning to plan. We did
that and were able to pull together some initial
ideas. At the same time, I recognized that we were
still coming at this territory from several different
perspectives. Rather than push for consensus, I
drafted notes after the session which attempted to
capture some of the central issues and dilemmas
we were contending with. In writing the notes, I
deliberately reected our continuing disagreements
and uncertainties by framing questions we were
still struggling with, or by literally noting our
contradictory viewpoints. It is an important
function of leadership in this kind of activity to

471

record the evolving ideas and circulate them back

into the conversation.
5.6. The challenges of providing leadership for
interactive talk
Earlier in this section, I explored the kinds of
materials we used and the tasks we took on to
explore mentoring practice jointly in the study
group. As was evident from that account, this kind
of professional development occasion does not
happen spontaneously, as Ball and Cohen
(1999) note. It requires considerable forethought
and preparation, and the development of particular materials that will enable participants to
engage in constructing understandings about core
aspects of the practice. Following upon that
preparation, we saw how particular kinds of
leadership moves are needed in fostering,
refocusing, sustaining, and consolidating inquiry,
and thus the joint construction of knowledge
among participants. With that backdrop, it is
apparent how complex it is to conduct this kind of
inquiry-oriented talk in a study group format.
Leadership for this kind of activity requires a
knowledge of the terrain of teaching in question, in
this case, mentoring, in order to construct
materials that address essential tasks of the
practice.
This kind of leadership also requires orchestrating such tasks exibly, invoking inquiry norms and
processes responsively, recognizing critical ideas as
they arise in participants comments, and maintaining an inquiry mode in managing the response
to such issues. There is a repertoire to be
developed around this kind of professional development practice, associated with the sorts of revoicing moves I identied, with the spontaneous
posing of tasks to consolidate emerging understandings, and the related activities of summarizing talk and generating written notes to create
texts of the groups evolving ideas. Finding the
right words for re-voicing comments demands a
blend of genuine curiosity about others ideas and
a tactful command of language to present thoughts
in respectful but clear terms. This goes beyond
popular conceptions of active listening where
one might simply re-state what someone else has

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

said. To be effective and helpful for others

negotiation of meaning, the group leaders revoicing comments need to pick up on larger
patterns of ideas lurking in the details of the
ongoing conversation and rebroadcast them in
ways that enable new perspectives or apparent
underlying principles to be apprehended.
Leadership for enacting inquiry-oriented professional development thus involves a series of
interrelated dimensions which must be orchestrated responsively. The inquiry focus puts ones
crucial attention on the learners and understanding the sense they are making, as Duckworth
(1987) advises. Yet in order to be in a position to
make such an effort, and to focus the learning on
the right target, one must construct materials and
make appropriate plans to enable participants to
make sense of central activities of the practice
under study. In the case of the CTSG, I was able to
introduce different and contrasting artifacts of
practice by making my own, as well as other
participants practice the context for our study.
We also see how enacting this kind of inquiryoriented practice requires a repertoire of moves
to promote inquirymoves which are easy to get
wrong. It requires a exible knowledge of the
territory of practice under study to enable
responsive facilitation of talk and the alignment
and repositioning of participants with respect to
each other and key ideas.

6. Conclusion
Nearly all teacher education programs face the
challenge of helping the mentor teachers they
depend upon become engaged in the role of
mentor and learn a repertoire of mentoring
practices. This study suggests that teacher study
groups offer one promising avenue for supporting
such learning. While the work presented here is
exploratory, it points to signicant dimensions of
study group interaction which can promote
professional learning. At the same time this work
contributes to what I hope will be a growing
literature of accounts of school-based teacher
education work by providing images and repre-

sentations of inquiry-oriented mentoring practice

and how it can be learned.
Although focused on developing teachers understanding about and practice of mentoring, this
study also offers wider insight about and provides
an example of the kind of professional learning
needed to promote inquiry-oriented practice more
generally. Ball and Cohen (1999) have argued for
the value of situating such learning in the context
of materials of practice, and have suggested ideas
about the kind of discourse about such materials
that would promote inquiry-oriented learning. In
this study, we saw how, by fostering interactive
talk around artifacts of mentoring practice, developed out of the practice of CTSG participants, we
were able to jointly construct understandings of
mentoring practice. I examined the features of our
talk which seemed to promote inquiry, particularly
emphasizing the collaborative construction of the
oor and re-voicing strategies that had the
effect of aligning participants in relation to each
other and to ideas about mentoring. It would be
useful to investigate other contexts for professional discourse to see if these ideas provide a
useful lens for analyzing inquiry-oriented talk. It
would also be interesting to examine the discourse
in other experienced study groups to see if the
constructs proposed here to describe the joint
construction and collective warranting of ideas are
applicable in other communities of professional
practice.
I also focused upon the qualities and skills of
leadership needed to promote inquiry-oriented
professional learning. I analyzed the role that I
played in developing materials of practice, in
designing analytic tasks, in modeling re-voicing
moves myself, and in directing the ow of
conversation to promote inquiry. Taken together,
these dimensions of the leadership role call
attention to the challenges of nding or developing
persons with the experience and capacity to fulll
such roles. As with other forms of inquiry-oriented
practice, this practice of leadership also needs to
be learned in and through practice. Hopefully, this
account may be of use to others in venturing into
that territory.
A nal contribution of this study is to introduce
a potentially useful analytic approach for studying

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D. Carroll / Teaching and Teacher Education 21 (2005) 457473

how learning occurs through interactive talk. The

construct of participant frameworks offers a
promising approach to analyzing how participation in certain kinds of inquiry-oriented talk
promotes learning, and to identifying evidence of
such learning. In this case, I directed the focus of
my use of the participant framework construct
toward mentoring and inquiry content. In other
cases, it could work equally well, I believe, to
examine content around such things as history
learning or literacy instruction. Providing evidence
of the link between reform-oriented professional
learning opportunities focusing on discourse, such
as teacher study groups, and participants resulting
learning, is a recognized need in current educational research (Wilson & Berne, 1999). The
usefulness of the analytic approach employed in
this study warrants further investigation of these
ideas in other contexts.

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