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Facilitating discussions in English Language Arts can develop students’ skills as speakers and listeners and their ability to engage with diverse perspectives. However, classroom observations often demonstrate a lack of student talk, raising questions about the complexity of facilitating discussion and teachers’ opportunities to learn and hone the practice. In this article, we discuss how teacher educators leveraged a collaboratively designed specification of the practice of facilitating discussions to attempt some alignment across three programs. The teacher educators reached what we call alignment amid variation. There was consistency in the stances regarding the role of children in classrooms and understanding of the purposes for and key aspects of the practice that allowed for alignment amid variation in their work with novice teachers across programs. Our findings have implications for considering the work of cross-institutional collaborations to improve teacher preparation and K-12 student learning.

In participatory cultures, the lines between producers and consumers of text are blurred, and communities emerge that are based on shared interest and peer support. Although literacy scholarship has mostly focused on youth engagement and literacy practices within online participatory cultures, scholars in the learning sciences investigate these ideas through connected learning. This article explores bringing connected learning principles into English classrooms and examines how one high school, partnering with the National Writing Project, redesigned their senior English course and senior capstone project around connected learning. The authors highlight its design and share students’ experiences with the project to illustrate the possibilities and tensions around designing for such a project in school settings.

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