Guiding Principles for Fostering Productive Disciplinary Engagement: Explaining an Emergent Argument in a Community of Learners Classroom

This article suggests that productive disciplinary engagement can be fostered by designing learning environments that support (a) problematizing subject matter, (b) giving students authority to address such problems, (c) holding students accountable to others and to shared disciplinary norms, and (d) providing students with relevant resources. To provide empirical support for this suggestion, we use these 4 guiding principles to explain a case of productive disciplinary engagement from a Fostering Communities of Learners classroom. We use the principles to understand 1 group of students' emergent and sustained controversy over a species' classification. The students became passionately engaged, used evidence…