QTEL News: A Renewed Focus on Learning through Talk

A Renewed Focus on Learning Through Talk

With spring semester now in full swing, we invite teachers and leaders to recommit to designing learning spaces where student talk is intentional and rigorous. Quality interactions don’t happen by chance; they are deliberately planned, supported, and sustained. 

Deep conceptual and language learning—especially for English and multilingual learners—relies on multiple opportunities for students to engage in sustained quality interactions. Of course, this means that educators also need to understand how to structure and model these opportunities.  

Teacher Corner 

Sustaining Academic Rigor through Quality Interactions 

Now is a powerful time to reflect on how students are interacting with content—and with each other. 

Quality student interactions are: 

• Sustained and reciprocal 

• Focused on key disciplinary ideas 

• Designed for students to co-construct understanding 

• Opportunities for meaningful use of academic language 

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 Quality student interactions are NOT: 

• Scripted talk with predetermined answers 

• Turn and talks where each student shares but they do not respond to each other 

• Teacher-dominated exchanges 

• Brief question/answer routines with limited thinking, including choral responses 

  
  

To support this work, use the Designing Quality Interactions Planning Tool to intentionally plan tasks, prompts, and structures that invite every student into rigorous talk.

Leading with Purpose 

Guiding Teachers to Design for Quality Interactions 

Read and share this Quality Student Interactions brief (Billings and Mueller, 2017) that highlights why interaction is essential to language development, disciplinary thinking, and student autonomy—especially for multilingual learners. 

Read the brief to learn more about: 

• Building teacher capacity to design and implement structures that sustain student conversation and academic rigor. 

• Developing teachers’ understanding of how student grouping is a means of scaffolding.  

• Encouraging teachers to provide formulaic expressions for students that support elaboration and reasoning and which contain invitations for reciprocal conversation. 

• Increasing modeling of interactions. Reciprocal sustained conversations need to be explicitly modeled by the teacher or by student volunteers. This modeling serves as an essential scaffold for students learning an additional language.  

Upcoming Opportunities 

Register Now for Our 2026 QTEL Summer Institutes

Following the success of our QTEL Winter Institutes, WestEd’s Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) invites you to join our summer professional development institutes.

This year’s summer institutes, taking place in Santa Cruz, CA; Seal Beach, CA; and Austin, TX, will empower educators to foster deep, transferable learning for English and multilingual learners.

Collaborate with educators from across the country, share ideas, and discover new ways to foster meaningful learning experiences that help every student thrive.

Spaces are limited, so secure your spot today. Register now!