This video opens with a student-initiated question related to the text, a story about a man, Waterhouse, who created drawings and models of dinosaurs that he displayed for the public. The initial student question sets the stage for much of the discussion, which is student-centered and almost entirely led by the students in the group.

In response to this first question, students provide answers that are highly indicative of academically productive talk. For example, students nearly always state their ideas and then support those ideas using evidence from their text and/or their own prior knowledge. This support leads to rich, elaborated explanations that evidence the students’ deep thinking about the text.

We also observe in this section that students are accustomed to using talk to build knowledge together, listening carefully and responding directly to each other. They frequently state when they agree with others’ ideas and do not hesitate to disagree with each other and provide explanations for why they disagree.

Here, students speculate about how Waterhouse, and ultimately how they, felt when he learned that royalty would be visiting his exhibition. This part of the discussion is a good example of how students can make connections with the text related to their personal feelings and experiences, which afford them a deeper understanding of the characters in the text.

Students move on from the previous question to speculate about what they would do if, like the character in the story, they discovered that someone had stolen their work. As in the previous section, the group reflects on their personal feelings to consider what they would do and how they might react, and they both build upon and challenge each other's ideas. As the talk progresses, students become quite enthusiastic in their discussion about confronting a potential thief and the talk moves away from the content of the text.

As such, near the end of the video, the teacher steps in and directs the students to get back to the text. Notably, this is the first time the teacher has participated in the discussion since the beginning of the video. Through the previous nine minutes, students took complete responsibility for the discussion, both asking and responding to questions, building upon each other’s ideas, and taking on interpretive authority of the text – all without the teacher guiding or controlling what was happening. This is an excellent example of the kinds of talk that students are capable of when given direction and practice with student-centered discussion. The teacher’s presence is still important, and she may use her position, as she does here, to reel the students back in when they veer off too much from the story, but she only does this as needed. Finally, at the end of the video, she participates again, stating her intention to model asking an uptake question to help students delve more deeply into the ideas they are expressing.