Maren Aukerman is an assistant professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary and a former bilingual teacher. She is the recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, which helped support this research, and she also received the 2009 Albert J. Harris Award for her Research in the Teaching of English article “When Reading It Wrong Is Getting It Right: Shared Evaluation Pedagogy Among Struggling Fifth Grade Readers.” Her research focuses on how students make meaning from text in conversation with others and how teachers can better facilitate talk that makes authentic room for student voices. 

Lorien Chambers Schuldt is an assistant professor in the Teacher Education Department at Fort Lewis College, where she studies elementary literacy and teacher learning around reading and writing instruction. A former early elementary teacher, she focuses her work on teacher-student interactions during literacy instruction and the ways that these interactions can support students to engage in authentic reading and writing. Her recent work with Maren Aukerman has appeared in Reading Research Quarterly, Language Arts, and Journal of Literacy Research. She was the recipient of a 2013 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. 
Liam Aiello is a doctoral candidate in literacy education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he studies the connections between dialogic pedagogy and critical literacy, especially among adolescent readers in small-group discussions. His dissertation documents a multiyear partnership with middle school teachers as they inquire into their students’ critical work with texts. His work is informed by his time as a fifth-grade teacher, as well as by his upbringing in a family of professional educators.

Paolo C. Martin is a doctoral candidate in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a recent graduate of the master of science program in community health and prevention research at Stanford School of Medicine. His work involves observing children’s experiences of well-being across a range of classroom pedagogies, with an emphasis on dialogically organized instruction. Before his graduate work at Stanford, Martin was a bench scientist and then a reading specialist in South Central Los Angeles; he later became a teacher educator and curriculum developer in the San Francisco Bay Area.