We dedicate this article to our good friend and colleague, Jennifer Wilson, a person with whom we loved to think and laugh and write. Through an act of violence, her life was taken away from us on August 28th, 2011. This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class adults in a culture circle in Brazil interrogating systems of poverty, and teens in youth organizations discussing their photo-essays that challenge negative stereotypes of youth. In this paper, we analyze discursive practices that fostered critical dialogue across these settings. In doing so, we seek to describe practices that can support practitioners as they facilitate critical dialogue with learners and one another in order to become more critically engaged participants in their own communities.As colleagues engaged in critical pedagogy and critical literacy, we have puzzled together about practices that best support learners of all ages in understanding how structures of power, privilege, and oppression are socially constructed and how those structures could be deconstructed and transformed. Examining transcripts from our own classrooms and research sites, we recognized the central role of dialogue in this critical work. We saw, across these transcripts, how participants were engaged in what we came to call "critical dialogue"-identifying, challenging, and reframing status quo discourses that can then be acted upon in new ways that challenge oppression and open opportunities for transformation (Jennings, Jewett, Laman, Souto-Manning,

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the coaching element that was included in an existing graduate literacy course and to describe the responses of experienced and less-experienced teachers as they began to add collaborative peer coaching to their teaching identities. Design/methodology/approach -Data collected included teachers' coaching logs and written reflections on the coaching experience, and field notes taken by a professor. Data were analysed qualitatively through open coding. Initially, the authors read data individually and coded them by what they perceived to be the teachers' coaching moves. Separately, they developed lists of codes and then reviewed coding lists to work through idiosyncratic data, collapse codes, align their language. Findings -The authors identified three overarching and multi-faceted moves that the coaching teachers made as they worked with partner teachers. They found that the teachers: used restraint; focused on partner teacher's needs; and provided opportunities for classroom observations and demonstrations. Practical implications -Due to budget cuts, district coaching initiatives are being down-sized. With fewer literacy coaches available, the authors believe that classroom teachers would benefit from learning about how to support each another as peer coaches. Social implications -Teachers' coaching moves, along with the curricular conversations engendered by them, created a culture of learning based on reflection and dialogue between coaching and partner teachers. Originality/value -Very few studies have been conducted on peer coaching or have addressed the process by which teachers enrolled in graduate programs learned how to engage in collaborative peer coaching.

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Recent research suggests that personal and institutional constraints often limit the degree to which professional development impacts teaching practice. Darling‐Hammond suggests that one of those constraints is time in schools for collaborative planning. She cites high performing schools in Europe and Asia that have three to four times more collaborative planning time for teachers than schools in the United States, and she suggests that teachers need to discover ways to collaborate to solve problems and improve practice. One way to create the kinds of collaborative teaching communities that Darling‐Hammond proposes is with peer coaching, and this article describes a group of teachers who found ways to work and learn together by adding collaborative peer coaching to their identities as teachers.

Geocaching is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking, in which participants can place a cache anywhere in the world, pinpoint its location using global positioning system technology, and then share the geocache's existence and location online. This article describes the geocaching adventures the author took with three boys, ages 11, 8, and 6, and the holistic, organic, and authentic learning that occurred as they engaged in a treasure hunt of sorts in the natural world. This article also explores the multiple digital and print literacies in which geocachers engage and how these out‐of‐school literate experiences relate to what we know about in‐school literacy. Finally, the author discusses the implications of geocaching and other digital literacies for teachers, providing links for those who would like to learn more.