In an effort to locate instances of Tharp and Gallimore's assisted performance in educational settings, teacher-student interactions in typical teacher-fronted classrooms are contrasted with the organization of talk across a variety of alternate educational participant structures—a teacher-student conference, small group work, the making of a class video, and a problem-solving interaction in a computer lab—that deviate from the traditional "default script" (Cazden, 1988, p. 53) of classroom interactions. We consider how each learning arrangement affects the extent to which students are able to initiate, control, and maintain interaction, and the extent to which their agendas are articulated. We further consider the influence exerted by the multiple facets of each encounter's institutional and interpersonal context. This range of influences precludes a monolithic transfer of knowledge, pointing to the obviously agentive role of the novice as well as to ways in which historical and institutional expectations are represented (or altered) in interactional encounters. Hence, locating assisted performance uncovers a web of relationships among participants, tasks, and talk that both facilitate and constrain learning in a given novice-expert episode.

This report explores the ways in which instructional conversations between a teacher and her students contributed to building an academic community in a transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Through an analysis of reading lesson transcripts, classroom events, and student essays and journal assignments, this report shows how classroom experiences fostered the development of students' understanding of the concepts of sacrifice and responsibility. This report describes how, at both the individual and classroom community level, instructional conversations deepened student understandings of the texts they read in class by encouraging students to make connections between particular textual concepts and their own experiences. In addition to tracking student gains in understanding, this report shows how the conversations helped build a classroom community that incorporated the cultural beliefs and concerns of the students.