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I'm currently moving through my fourth decade as a teacher. What keeps me at it is the engagement and joy that I experience when my stu- dents-whether middle schoolers or the practicing teachers with whom I work- deeply and creatively immerse themselves in the challenges of conversing and lis- tening each other and their ideas into fuller existence, and therefore into new understandings and applications, all the while jointly producing important and usable meanings and actions instead of just consuming information provided from external sources.
The Promise of the Next Generation Standards
I have written in this space before about what I see as the primary promise of the next generation standards like the Common Core: that these can be leveraged to professionalize the field of teach- ing by promoting deep instruction and learning; we can accomplish this by using the standards to move away from facile information-transmission of the "what" to a profound apprenticeship of students and toward making meaning more ex- pertly (Smith, Appleman, & Wilhelm, 2014). Since the Common Core Anchor Standards are all framed with higher order thinking verbs, we know that the emphasis is on this kind of "why" and "how." Further, this "learning how to learn" is what is most transferable to future challenges and problems.
Deep learning that is then transferred and creatively applied to the world is "socially con- structed": it is not received passively from an ex- ternal source, but is actively created with cultural assistance, such as that from a teacher, knowl- edgeable peers, or a disciplinary community. This kind of learning is "internally persuasive" and is, according to the great Russian theorist M. M. Bakhtin, "affirmed through assimilation . . . . It is applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts" (1981, p. 345).
Facets and Benefits of Conversation
Inquiry and Conversation
If we want school topics, literary texts, scientific findings, historical documents, and our students' own writing to matter, if we want students to un- derstand and to creatively extend and elaborate and use what they have learned, Bakhtin argues, then we have to engage students in the "internal- ly persuasive" discourse of honest inquiry. How? Through critical reading that converses with au- thors, characters, and...