In CLAVES, instruction is driven primarily through dialogic approaches. Lessons have been designed to provide opportunities for students to use their language, or languages, in conversation with their teacher and their peers so that there is better distribution of labor and power dynamics  between teachers and students. In centering dialogic approaches to teaching, conversations about ideas and evidence in text are linked with students’ lived experiences and understandings about the worlds they live in. Engaging in this kind of text- and experience-based talk gives students space to contribute their understandings, whether they are emerging from the text, grounded in prior experience, or both.

​

During guided readings of text and language-based instruction, students are supported to share what they are thinking and to participate in collaboratively constructing meaning about text and language. On Day 7 of a text cycle, students participate in dialogic reasoning, in which they discuss a big question pulled from the text that they have been thinking about over the previous 6 days of instruction. Across all days in a text cycle, students should be encouraged to contribute to discussions about text, language, and the big question using all of their language resources to engage in each lesson.